#loyda martinez

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[rt8815]

Yeeeaaah, think I'll pass on watching Oppenheimer.

[jerzwriter]

Wow.

Now, this movie I would pay to see. But if this is whitewashed out of Oppenheimer, that will be a hard pass for me.

[noodleincident]

ok i just spend like 20 minutes researching this thread for no reason except to say that i cant find anything about loyda martinez or a class action suit in westlaw. plus it seems genuinely unclear whether people knew the extent of the impacts of a-bombs at the time. that being said, if you're interested in this, here are some actual sources and more information:

info about the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act

[denimbex1986]

'In the movie "Oppenheimer" the eponymous character played by Cillian Murphy says the proposed site for a secret atomic weapons lab in northern New Mexico has only a boys' school and Indians performing burial rites.

But there were homesteaders living on that land.

In 1942, the U.S. Army gave 32 Hispano families on the Pajarito Plateau 48 hours to leave their homes and land, in some cases at gunpoint, to build the lab that would create the world's first atomic bombs, according to relatives of those removed and a former lab employee.

Homes were bulldozed, livestock shot or let loose, and families given little or no compensation, according to Loyda Martinez, 67, who worked as a computer scientist for 32 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and cited accounts from evicted ranching and farming families who are her neighbors in the Espanola Valley.

A National Nuclear Security Administration spokesperson said Hispanic farmers were compensated at a significantly lower rate than white property owners but the agency was not aware of homes being destroyed and animals killed or abandoned. The agency did not address whether homesteaders were forcefully removed.

Martinez has spent decades campaigning for the evicted homesteaders and the rights of Hispano, Native, women and other lab employees and has won two class action suits relating to equal pay and treatment for them.

"These were Hispanic American homesteaders which perhaps explains why this dark episode in American history is so ignored," she said.

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster "Oppenheimer" has stirred up northern New Mexico's conflicted relationship with "the lab," which today has over 14,000 workers and is the region's largest employer.

For many local Hispanos - descendants of Spanish colonial settlers - its high wages have paid for homes, higher education, and a chance to hang onto multigenerational lands in this land-rich, cash-poor area.

Marcel Torres, whose family has lived in the Penasco area since the 1700s, worked in the lab's most secret sectors for 35 years as a machinist helping build nuclear weapons - to, he said, "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 said he earned around three times as much at the lab as he would have elsewhere in the area.

For others, the lab carries a legacy of death and dispossession.

Martinez lobbied the U.S. Congress for compensation for employees like her father, a lab worker who died after working with toxic chemical element beryllium.

In 2000 Congress acknowledged that radiation and other toxins had contributed to the deaths or illnesses of thousands of nuclear weapons workers.

The Department of Labor set up a compensation fund for those affected but it took years for families to be paid, said Martinez, who served on New Mexico's state human rights commission in the early 2000s.

Myrriah Gomez, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, said her great-grandparents were evicted from their 63-acre ranch to build the lab and 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 wrote "Nuclear Nuevo Mexico" about the setting up of the lab.

Author Alisa Valdes, who has written a screenplay on Loyda Martinez, said scenes in "Oppenheimer" shot near Abiquiu, New Mexico, depicting the lab in an empty landscape echoed the U.S. government's line that the area was uninhabited.

Publicists for the movie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lab was built on lands sacred to local Tewa people that were granted to Hispano settlers under Spanish colonial rule then allotted to both Hispano and white homesteaders after the United States occupied the area following the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War.

"Taking land for Los Alamos was not an aberration, it's what the United States had been doing since 1848," said State Historian of New Mexico Rob Martinez, whose great uncle worked at the lab.

In 2004, homesteader families won a $10 million compensation fund from the U.S. government.

Today Los Alamos County, where the lab is based, is one of the richest and best-educated in the United States. Neighboring Rio Arriba County, which is 91% Hispanic and Native American, is among the country's poorest, with the lowest academic scores.

"There's no economic development in our areas because it's all focused in Los Alamos," said Cristian Madrid-Estrada, director of the regional homeless shelter in Espanola, Rio Arriba's largest town.

The lab said over 61% of employees hired since 2018 were from New Mexico, with most of its workforce living outside Los Alamos County.

"We are dedicated to the success of this region we all call home," a spokesperson said in a statement.'

[kwebtv]

The Alamo:  Thirteen Days to Glory -  NBC -  January 26, 1987

Historical Drama 

Running Time:  170 minutes

Stars:

James Arness as James Bowie

Brian Keith as Davy Crockett

Alec Baldwin as William Barrett Travis

Raul Julia as General Antonio López de Santa Anna

David Ogden Stiers as Colonel Black

Jon Lindstrom as Capt. Almaron Dickinson

Lorne Greene as Sam Houston (in his final film role)

Jim Metzler as Maj. James Bonham

Tom Schanley as Pvt. Danny Cloud

Fernando Allende as Col. Alamonte 

Kathleen York as Susannah Dickinson

Isela Vega as Senora Cos

Gene Evans as McGregor

Michael Wren as Juan Seguin

Hinton Battle as Joe 

David Sheiner as Luis

Noble Willingham as Dr. Pollard

Eloy Casados as Gregorio

Tony Becker as George Taylor

Thomas Callaway as Col. James W. Fannin

Buck Taylor as "Colorado" Smith

Jerry Potter as Jacob Walker

Grainger Hines as Charles Despelier

Tom Everett as Major Evans

Stan Ivar as Doc Sutherland

Ethan Wayne as Edward Taylor

Jan Tríska as General Wolf

Gary Kasper as Major Wheelwright

John Furlong as Zanco

Jay Baker as Hayes

Dale Swann as Lt. Kimball

Laura Fabian as Lucia

Loyda Ramos as Senora Esparza

Bel Sandre as Mina

Laura Martinez Harring as Santa Anna's bride

Nicky Blair as John Jones

Red West as Cockran 

[hussyknee]

tbh: you should just take all of that first thread out of the oppenheimer post. it's a little bit of truth (a couple dozen families of hispanic homesteaders had their land seized via imminent domain and were unjustly compensated) coupled with a *lot* of b.s. or exaggeration (their livestock were SHOT, they were FORCED to work in berylium mines, white workers got protective gear but hispanic ones didn't, loyda martinez sued because of the beryliosis, etc. etc.)

Thank you for telling me. I only did a general check on whether the issue was real instead of whether each claim was true. My bad. I was only able to do a cursory Google search on those claims, which didn't turn up anything, but Google is also pretty unreliable now. I'm beginning to doubt whether Alisa is a good faith actor though, which is a shame because it sabotages the surfacing of the violence done to New Mexico's Hispanos. I disabled reblogs on the post until I could look into it in-depth.

In the meantime, here's a source for the population impact and infant mortality of people caught downwind of the Trinity test:

Here's one about an NYC vigil held for the New Mexico people affected by The Manhattan Project's nuclear tests.

“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site some 200 miles (322 kilometers) away.

And by far the most blood-curdling thing I found:

Jesus Christ. There's a book called The Plutonium Files written about the experiments conducted for The Manhattan Project. From the Wikipedia article:

What. The fuck. I'd never be lax about unverified claims, but you can see why shooting livestock and the forced labour of native landholders doesn't stretch believability to a lot of people.

Here's a very detailed but easy to read pdf about the experiments and who spearheaded them. I'm ADHDing my way through it, but it does include Oppenheimer's own proximity to the trials.