Los Alamos
the other side of the story
Welcome to Postcards from New Mexico! Two Sundays a month, I share beauty, stories, and culture from this region that has been my home since 2008. One of my intentions with Postcards of New Mexico is to offer perspectives on this beautiful area that you won’t get through tourist websites and brochures. Today’s postcard is a good example…
Los Alamos is a small town (13,000 population) that sits on the Pajarito Plateau, about a 40-minute drive from Santa Fe. If you’ve heard of it, it’s most likely because of its notoriety as the location that Robert Oppenheimer chose to be the headquarters for the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) still dominates the town, and stories of building the atomic bomb shape much of the mainstream narrative here. You can walk through the small downtown area and visit numerous historic sites related to the Manhattan Project, and get a download of nuclear propaganda at the Bradbury Science Museum.
Today, though, I’d like to offer you another side of the story. Long before Oppenheimer ever came here for youth camp that put the region in his awareness, this area was (and still is) a sacred site for the Tewa people. The Pueblo of San Ildefonso is adjacent to Los Alamos and the lab, and by all rights this should still be land that is part of the Pueblo. The Indigenous people were not the only ones to make this area their home. Hispano families and homesteaders also lived here up until the early 1940s, when the U.S. government seized their land to build the lab. (If you want to learn more about this history, Nuclear Nuevo Mexico by Myrriah Gomez is an excellent book.)
As you enter town, you pass by a sign that says, “Los Alamos: Where discoveries are made.” This is of course true, but the slogan leaves out the fact that the discoveries here have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. You are no doubt aware of the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan, but what is less widely known is the long legacy of environmental toxicity that emanates from LANL, and how the Manhattan Project and the lab have impacted Indigenous and land-based communities in this area.
Weapons production in Los Alamos did not stop at the end of World War II. This year the federal government has set a goal of producing 30 plutonium pits at LANL.
I encourage you to take a bit of time to watch this video featuring Marian Naranjo, an elder from Santa Clara Pueblo, to get more of an understanding of what it means for this massive nuclear project to be located in this area.
By the way, Marian is the founder of Honor Our Pueblo Existence (H.O.P.E.), one of the organizations that receives a portion of paid subscriptions to this newsletter.
Learn more about the other side of the story of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project.
Los Alamos is one of my favorite places to go especially on hot summer days, because I can escape the heat of the Española valley for a little while and be up in the mountains and pine trees of the Pajarito Plateau – all within a 25-minute spectacular drive from my home. I love winding my way up the hills that are the base of the plateau, and passing nearby magnificent ancestral Pueblo sites like Tsankawi. The town is definitely worth a visit and in future postcards I’ll feature other highlights up on the mesa, including wonderful hiking trails. But today with the anniversary of the Trinity test just passed and of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki coming in early August, I wanted to give you the side of the story that is too often hidden away.
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p.s. You might also enjoy my other Substack newsletter: The Practice of Life
Your readers might be interested in this movie
https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/
about the downwinders and their ongoing plight.
Thank you for sharing the experience of the Indigenous people in Los Alamos. I live in Hawaii, another land stolen from Indigenous people. In recent years, there has been a fight over building a second telescope on sacred land. The struggles continue for Indigenous people everywhere.