Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The Toxic
Legacy of Racism and Nuclear Waste Is Very Much Still With Us in Los Alamos
September 4, 2016
Taryn Fivek
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Altermet
NEW
MEXICO—The air is crisp, cool and fresh. The sun is warm, but not
too much. Residents picnic at a pond complete with
cruising swans and ducks. The vistas of the Jemez Mountains and the mesas
of the Pajarito Plateau are breathtaking. Flowers are in bloom.
Everything is green. The historical structures are quaint and rustic,
ranch-style houses made of wood and corrugated tin. The city is quiet and
peaceful, a perfect slice of small-town America. It's difficult at
times to remember that this is the part of the world where the nuclear bomb was
invented. It's hard to picture the hundreds of thousands who died in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki while standing in this environment, filling
your lungs with fresh air; difficult to imagine the sounds of the celebrations that ensued [1] after
receiving the news via telegram from Truman while you listen to the
wind rustle through the trees. No one could hear the screams of
burning children halfway across the world from all the way up here.
Los Alamos
is the definition of a boomtown, a town that was built in a hurry. After
the site was selected in 1943, 8,900 acres of private land
were condemned by the U.S. government and its inhabitants evicted. The
government got quite a deal [2] on
what would one day be the most valuable property it owned; it paid $225 per
acre to the white landowners, while the Hispanic homesteaders received far
less, some only $7 per acre, some not paid at all.
What
Oppenheimer had estimated would be a city of only 100 people ballooned into
6,000 almost overnight. These scientists and soldiers needed help. They found
it in the valleys below the "Hill," from the nearby San Ildefonso and
Santa Clara Pueblos, and from the nearby city of Española. When the first
pioneers of nuclear holocaust arrived, they bused up Native American and
Mexican men to build the structures and women to be maids, cooks and nannies,
paying them about $3 an hour in today's money[3].
The site of
Los Alamos was chosen because there were few people nearby, though
according to census numbers available at the time, tens of thousands of people
already lived in the area. The majority of area history is about the Los Alamos Boy's Ranch [4], a
scout-like health resort for the sons of the wealthy, staffed by Harvard and
Yale alumni. Census numbers for Pueblo people during that time
are difficult to find. It's difficult to find the numbers of people who
came up to work from the Pueblos, from the nearby Spanish-speaking villages and
cities. Rebecca Collinsworth, archivist for Los Alamos, tells me they're
probably buried in an archive in Washington D.C., and maybe even
classified. As far as history tells it, Los Alamos was mainly built
on a land without people for a people without land.
Much else
is classified: the weapons of mass destruction being built nearby, the
10,800,000 cubic feet (enough to fill 1.4 million 55 gallon drums according to
the Los Alamos Study Group [5]) of
radioactive waste stored in the ground, the theft of land and contamination of
natural resources, the exploitation of local labor and the cancer rate [6]. Forget
the ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shuffling by with mouths agape at this
peaceful scene, witnessing children playing in the shadows of monuments
honoring the architects of mass slaughter. You can see the ruins of a Tewa
Pueblo from Oppenheimer’s back porch, hollowed out like the Genbaku Dome left
standing as a skeletal memorial in Hiroshima. The only war memorial I could
find in town honors the dead from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
No one I
interviewed for this dispatch agreed to be photographed. Some refused to allow
me to record the interviews by audio. There’s a surface tension in this part of
the Pajarito Plateau that is hard to navigate. The only man who was open about
his opinions regarding Los Alamos was Ed Grothus, who once ran a military
supply store called the Black Hole and preached against nuclear war from his
nearby A-frame where he held "bomb unworshiping" ceremonies. Grothus
died in 2009. His store and nearby church are now boarded up, empty and
rotting. I thought about his words, which Mother Jones [7] reported
in 2003: "I don't change their minds. They're convinced. I just try to
make them cognizant of what they do. If I weren't here, there'd be nobody
speaking out—nobody."
In 2016, it
feels like he's right. Occasionally there are protests put on by people
"from Santa Fe," I'm told, not from around here. This is, as Jean
Wilson calls it, "a company town." She's been here since the age of
7, when her father came up to run the meat commissary for the military. She
does not agree to be recorded, though we speak for nearly an hour. She tells me
about buses that brought up men and women from neighboring Pueblos and
"Hispano" villages to work as laborers and maids. Wilson describes a
caste system, with the elite scientists at the top earning their houses on
"Bathtub Row" (named because they were the only dwellings with
bathtubs) while the majority lived in substandard housing.
Wilson
tells me no one really knew what was going on, except those at the top.
Machinists made parts, physicists solved problems and the different components
were assembled by a select few. People had an idea, however. When the Gadget
was taken to the desert near Socorro, Wilson's mother took her to Nebraska
after hearing rumors that the atmosphere would catch fire. But her father wrote
saying that the "cat screamed all night" after they left, code for
the success of the first detonation of an atomic weapon on the
planet, on July 16, 1945. It was called "Trinity" after Oppenheimer's
love for the poetry of John Donne and for his dead communist mistress who first
introduced him to Donne's work. The wives who had stayed in Los Alamos
after the Gadget left for Southeast New Mexico stood on top of the nearby
mountains to see the light of the explosion almost 200 miles away. Wilson tells
me they drank heavily in those days.
There were
celebrations and parties after the bombs ripped through Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, blasting away hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and sending
a message to the Soviet Union, which, having defeated Hitler in Europe, had
turned its attention to Japan in the East.
It remains
a company town even after the war, Wilson says, telling me that the city
isn't too political, that it's family oriented. She tells me the only
real problems they have in this quiet, idyllic community are high rates of brain cancer [8], though
scientists are quick to swat away the statistics of four-fold rates of
thyroid cancer by insisting it's too small of a sample size, saying
perhaps other factors are responsible. Not necessarily the millions of barrels
of nuclear waste nearby.
The other
problem, Jean Wilson tells me, are the drugs being brought onto the Hill
by those people from the valley. She's probably not
incorrect; in addition to high rates of poverty, communities such as Española
and Chimayo have some of the highest rates of heroin use [9] in
the country. That they sit next to and service the most affluent city in
New Mexico (and second most affluent [10] in
the United States) is no accident; here is a poor community that's probably too
busy fighting heroin and poverty to put up a fight about nuclear war.
I'm curious
about this labor. It goes almost unmentioned in the history, outside
of oral histories [11] and a
few pages in books such as John Hunner's Inventing Los Alamos [12]. There's
an exhibit at the Bradbury Museum of Science on "Voices of Project Y"
which features a Santa Clara Pueblo woman named Dasheno Chavarria, who was paid
around $4 an hour (in today's money) to clean up after the scientists who were
poisoning her ancestral land. She says, "I was disappointed
to learn that making a bomb was what was being done in Los Alamos."
Residents
tell me the buses to take the women and men up the Hill would stop under the
Pueblo's famous cottonwood tree.
I drive to
the San Ildefonso Pueblo and watch a VHS for the first time in years. It was
produced in the late 1990s and is about the relationship between the San
Ildefonso Pueblo and Los Alamos. "In our backyard, we have the capability
of wiping out the entire planet," says one of the members on the tape.
Outside, thunder rumbles across the valley and rain starts to fall. The tape
says the biggest threat to the Pueblo is the stormwater pushing "legacy
waste" into the Rio Grande, where not just the Pueblo, but many
millions downstream get their water.
"The
tribes weren't really fully aware of what was going on," says Elmer
Torres, former governor of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. I speak with him in the
back of his shop where he sells jewelry and art to tourists driving
past on NM-502. He is softspoken, hands folded on the table.
"Years
before, it was very uneasy. Like I said, the trust wasn't there."
Torres says
that in the early 1970s, officials started to bring up local tribal leaders to
visit their ancestral sites and explain what was going on at the lab.
"Just like any other high official they would bring in, congressional
folks from Washington, they were treated the same. As a VIP."
Does he
think if that visit had happened before the Manhattan Project that the Pueblos
and local communities would have allowed the Los Alamos Laboratory to proceed?
Torres thinks so, but then again, "I think we had so many different
players at that time. A lot of our tribal leaders or governors at that time
were not as educated as we have now. I think they would have stepped up to the
plate a little bit more. But back in those days, everything was handled through
the Bureau of Indian Affairs."
"Step
up to the plate"?
He pauses,
thinking. "They probably would have asked a lot more questions. And to see
what was really going on, why they were going to be there, all that.
And maybe, they probably would have said, We don't want Los Alamos up there.
But that's in the past now."
How does he
think people in the San Ildefonso Pueblo reacted when they found out what was
being built at Los Alamos?
"I
think they were pretty shocked to hear what happened. But at the same time,
they may have supported it, back in the early days."
I told him
that in my research, I read about celebrations taking place at the Pueblo to
commemorate the success of the bomb.
"I
think it was mainly for them [the scientists] as well, but I think for the
Native Americans in this area, it was probably not, as one of those, you would
say, a celebration...it was more a somber type, knowing something else
happened."
I ask
Torres what he thinks is the biggest challenge facing the country today.
He is immediate and firm in his response. His main concern is stewardship of
the environment. "If you don't have clean water, clean air and clean soil,
there's no way we're going to survive." I ask how the lab has contributed
to the environment in the area, and he tells me he's grateful that they are
starting to teach the tribe how to conduct its own water, soil and air
monitoring for contamination. The EPA has standards, he says, but there's no
way they can enforce everything.
Elmer
Torres worked at the lab himself for many years. He says things are more
diverse on the Hill now, and that management makes an effort by including
tribal members in quarterly meetings and allows the San Ildefonso governor
to request to visit their ancestral sites on the Hill. But the town is still in
its own "little world" in many ways. He says some of their sacred
sites had been vandalized by "young kids from Los Alamos," so LANL
put up barriers.
Does he
feel welcome in Los Alamos?
"Some
of the people up there don't know about the Pueblos. That's their livelihood.
They go to the office, go to the lab and work, but if you ask them about the
Pueblos they have no idea, they have no clue." Torres tells me the Pueblo
is only five miles away from Los Alamos as the crow flies.
Back in the
day, he says no one thought there were people living in the area when they
chose the site for Los Alamos. But surely the Bureau of Indian Affairs would
have known.
"On
the one hand, you'd trust the federal government to protect the Native
Americans for something like that, but on the other hand they kind of let us
down."
Other
Pueblo people are more open about how they are treated. One man told me that
when he takes his family to the movie theater in Los Alamos, he gets looks from
the residents that indicate to him he's not welcome. A woman living on the Hill
tells me her son wears his hair long in the traditional native style and gets
the same stares, sometimes even disrespect.
Emma is
friendly and says she judges people by their good energy. She is half Chicana
and half Pueblo Indian, originally from Southern New Mexico, from Luna County,
the fifth poorest in the state. She grew up thinking that people in Los Alamos
were well-off because they got everything handed to them; though to be fair,
Los Alamos is one of the most federally subsidized cities in the country [13]. After
living here since the 1970s, she has changed her mind. "It's probably
because we have very hard-working people. That's what it really comes down to.
You have to work hard, apply yourself and persevere."
Emma
married into a family of some of the first scientists to arrive in the
1940s. "Nothing was handed to them. They worked hard."
"I'm
sure they weren't greeted with open arms, but after a while, they were. We've
seen pictures of Pueblo families entertaining physicists. And vice versa. The
governor of the San Ildefonso Pueblo would come up here and make bread."
She smiles broadly. "He made wonderful bread."
"Throughout
the years, the relationship that I've seen between the people and the Pueblos
have been pretty, pretty good. They're kind to each other."
But others
say when they come up to the Hill, they don't feel altogether welcome. Does she
think that's true?
"I do.
I do. Back then, I don't know, I wasn't here, but I think they had a pretty
decent relationship with them. I know that some of the Pueblo people were up
here. I know Louis Bradbury and his wife went to the Pueblo for feast days. But
I think right now, there might be that."
"It's
hard to explain because for many years, this perception about Los Alamos and
the people up here is that they're handed everything, they've got all these
opportunities....and people who live down in the Española Area, the San
Ildefonso and Santa Clara, and what is it—the Okeo Winge Pueblo in that
area—they're struggling a lot. And that's from years and years of poverty. Not
just ten, fifteen, twenty, it goes back generations and generations. And
sometimes I think when they're not given a hand up, they feel like they're let
down, left behind, oppressed."
So she
thinks it's all about perceptions?
Emma
pauses. "I think it's a combination." She says she was out with some
special needs students she works with and was crossing the street with the
right of way, when a woman rolled down her window to shout racial slurs at
her. The children started to cry, not understanding. She brushed it off
and told them to "just turn around and laugh."
She relates
another story in which she was waiting to be helped at a store and the clerk
told her to step aside so she could help the two blonde boys behind her. She
says this was two years ago.
Emma chuckles,
shaking her head. "It does happen here."
The Los
Alamos National Laboratory was built with Pueblo and Spanish-speaking
labor. Children were raised by Pueblo and Spanish-speaking women. The land
being poisoned by nuclear waste is Pueblo land. The San Ildefonso hope to
remain on their land forever, but the rich who work in the labs will retire
elsewhere. Spanish-speaking homesteaders were evicted by the government when it
came time to build a weapon that would wipe out a quarter-million Japanese
people. Was this city built on the idea that some lives are worth more than
others?
"Back
then it was a different world," Emma explains. "And I don't think it
was, 'our lives matter more than their lives.'"
History
tells a more complicated story.
To Emma,
Los Alamos will always be around. Even though some of the scientists felt bad
about what they were doing, she tells me, the government owned the bomb.
Los Alamos
is indeed a microcosm of the U.S. Some people might feel bad about what's going
on, but individual conscience does not override that kind of policy. The
history reads that it was a land without a people for a people without a land,
those touched by brilliance to push the boundaries of human
accomplishment, Prometheus-style. No matter that it was built with exploited
labor; they are not included in the history anyway. No matter that it was done
to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians; there is no memorial here for them.
Things will
continue on in Los Alamos, no matter who is elected U.S. president in November.
The political roots run deeper than the surface justifications
of security or scientific advancement. And like the rest of
the United States, the lasting effects Los Alamos has had on the
planet will be felt for millennia to come, if humanity outlasts the
product of its labor for at least 24,100 years—the half-life of plutonium-239.
Taryn Fivek
is speaking with people across the country during the 2016 campaign season.
Follow her project at noplatform.org [14]or Twitter
at @fivek [15].
Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-09-05/toxic-legacy-racism-and-nuclear-waste-very-much-still-us-los-alamos
Links:
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=3Ks5BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA77&dq=%22site%20Y%20was%20no%20different%20as%20parties%20rocked%20los%20alamos%22&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q=%22site%20Y%20was%20no%20different%20as%20parties%20rocked%20los%20alamos%22&f=false
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/national/27LAND.html
[3] http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/winston-dabneys-interview-1992
[4] http://newmexicohistory.org/people/los-alamos-ranch-and-the-manhattan-project
[5] http://www.lasg.org/waste/area-g-waste.htm
[6] http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/RTKCancer.pdf
[7] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/05/fear-and-fallout-los-alamos
[8] https://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/10-12-multiplefiles/003_Athas%20and%20Key%201993%20LAC%20Cancer%20Rate%20Study%20Phase%201.pdf
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/us/02overdose.html
[10] http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2014/08/28/los-alamos-ranked-as-2nd-most-affluent-city-in.html
[11] http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/ellen-bradbury-reids-interview
[12] https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Los-Alamos-Growth-Community/dp/0806138912
[13] http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/most-of-state-struggles-as-los-alamos-thrives-on-federal/article_bb515de3-4ec7-5455-ae8d-6b925a5dcaa9.html
[14] http://noplatform.org
[15] http://www.twitter.com/fivek
[16] http://www.alternet.org/
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/national/27LAND.html
[3] http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/winston-dabneys-interview-1992
[4] http://newmexicohistory.org/people/los-alamos-ranch-and-the-manhattan-project
[5] http://www.lasg.org/waste/area-g-waste.htm
[6] http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/RTKCancer.pdf
[7] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/05/fear-and-fallout-los-alamos
[8] https://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/10-12-multiplefiles/003_Athas%20and%20Key%201993%20LAC%20Cancer%20Rate%20Study%20Phase%201.pdf
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/us/02overdose.html
[10] http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2014/08/28/los-alamos-ranked-as-2nd-most-affluent-city-in.html
[11] http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/ellen-bradbury-reids-interview
[12] https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Los-Alamos-Growth-Community/dp/0806138912
[13] http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/most-of-state-struggles-as-los-alamos-thrives-on-federal/article_bb515de3-4ec7-5455-ae8d-6b925a5dcaa9.html
[14] http://noplatform.org
[15] http://www.twitter.com/fivek
[16] http://www.alternet.org/
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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