No one knows what Carmelita Torres looked like; we know only that she led 200 women in the Bath Riots on the US-Mexican border on January 28, 1917. Then, as now, brown bodies in the borderlands were subjected to torture, cruelty, disease, and death. The stink of racism and xenophobia so bloody and strong that Nazi hounds licked their haunches as they circled our deserts and stomped through the creosote. When Carmelita refused to allow her body to be doused in gasoline 104 years ago, when brown bodies were laid out in the streets, when rocks made contact with badges, when Carmelita was jailed a legacy was laid at the feet of every generation to come through these streets. We carry the legacy of her resistance, still, in the borderlands. I have carried her with me through years of learning and defiance. I have carried her with me as I’ve marched, as I’ve stared at my own anxious face against those badges, as I’ve wept for our losses and celebrated our victories and our beauty. I carried her with me when I was jailed myself for crying out against the devastation of migrant bodies at the hands of this government a century after her arrest. I will carry her bones in my heart and send smoke to the sky in her name always and always.