Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer claims in the film that a boys’ school and Native American burial rituals are the only things to be found at the planned site for a covert atomic weapons plant in northern New Mexico.
However, homesteaders already occupied the area.
Relatives of those evacuated and a former worker at Los Alamos claim that in 1942, the US Army gave 32 Hispano people on the Pajarito Plateau 48 hours to leave their homes and property, in some cases under gunpoint, to construct the lab that would produce the world’s first atomic bombs.
According to Loyda Martinez, 67, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for 32 years, who spoke with evicted ranching and farming families in the Espanola Valley and heard their stories, homes were bulldozed, livestock was shot or let loose, and families received little or no compensation.
A representative for the National Nuclear Security Administration stated that the government was unaware of any destruction of dwellings or animals being abandoned or murdered, and that Hispanic farmers were compensated at a substantially lower cost than white property owners. The government body did not comment on the possibility of forcible eviction of homesteaders.
Martinez has fought for decades for the rights of evicted homesteaders and Hispanic, Native American, female, and other lab employees, winning two class action suits for them that dealt with fair pay and treatment.
She speculated that the erasure of this bleak period in American history was due to the fact that the victims were Hispanic Americans.
The tense connection between the people of northern New Mexico and “the lab,” which now employs more than 14,000 people, has been rekindled by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer.
Many local Hispanos, descended from Spanish colonial settlers, have benefited from the industry’s high incomes, which have allowed them to buy homes, send their children to college, and keep their intergenerational farms.
Marcel Torres, whose ancestors settled the Penasco region in the 1700s, spent 35 years as a machinist in the lab’s most secure areas, where they built nuclear bombs, in an effort to “try and prevent a world war.”
“We were so valuable to them that they didn’t care who we were in race,” said Torres, 78, who earned roughly three times as much at the lab than he would have elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Others associate the lab with memories of loss and eviction.
Martinez fought for compensation for workers like her father, a lab worker who died from exposure to the deadly chemical element beryllium, by lobbying the United States Congress.
Thousands of people who worked on nuclear weapons died or were sick because of exposure to radiation and other poisons, which was confirmed by Congress in 2000.
Workers’ compensation was established by the Department of Labor, but it took years for families to be compensated, according to Martinez, who served on New Mexico’s state human rights commission in the early 2000s.
Assistant professor Myrriah Gomez of the University of New Mexico has revealed that her great-grandparents were forced to leave their 63-acre ranch in order to make way for the lab, and that her grandfather died of colon cancer after working on the Manhattan Project.
“Oppenheimer had no qualms about displacing people from their homelands,” said Gomez, who penned Nuclear Nuevo Mexico about the establishment of the lab.
Alisa Valdes, who wrote a script about Loyda Martinez, claims that the sequences of Oppenheimer filmed near Abiquiu, New Mexico, echo the US government’s line that the area is uninhabited.
When asked for comment, the film’s publicists didn’t get back to us right away.
The location where the lab now stands is considered sacred by the indigenous Tewa people. During Spanish colonial control, the land was given to Hispano settlers, and after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), it was given to both Hispano and white homesteaders.
“Taking land for Los Alamos was not an aberration, it’s what the United States had been doing since 1848,” said Rob Martinez, the state historian of New Mexico and a descendant of a lab worker.
The U.S. government awarded $10 million to homesteading families in 2004.
As a result of the lab’s contributions, Los Alamos County, New Mexico, is now among the wealthiest and most educated in the country. In the neighboring Rio Arriba County, where the population is 91% Hispanic and Native American, poverty and low test results are endemic.
Espanola, the capital and largest city of Rio Arriba, is home to the regional homeless shelter run by Cristian Madrid-Estrada. “There’s no economic development in our areas because it’s all focused in Los Alamos,” he said.
Over 61% of new hires at the lab since 2018 are from New Mexico, with the majority coming from areas outside of Los Alamos County, according to the lab.
The region we all call home is important to us, and we are committed to seeing it thrive, the representative said.
