Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos by Myrriah Gómez (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos by Myrriah Gómez
• Carolyn Dekker

Myrriah Gómez, Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2022. 163 pp. Paper, $30; e-book, $30.

In Nuclear Nuevo México Myrriah Gómez provides a history of the development of the atomic bomb and the ongoing impacts of the entire nuclear industry on New Mexico through the lens of nuclear colonialism and from the perspective of the vecinos, the Nuevomexicana/o neighbors and community members who were displaced for the creation of the Los Alamos National Lab on "the Hill" and who have been, and continue to be, the majority of its labor force and a large portion of the victims of its contaminants. She distinguishes nuclear colonialism from New Mexico's first two waves of settler colonialism because "nuclear colonialism … targets not only Indigenous people but also other ethnic minority groups in poor economic situations that have become disenfranchised because of state occupation of their homelands" (5).

The book is rich with the experiences of the vecinos, including stories of the author's great-grandparents' displacement from their ranch in 1942 and the experiences of multiple generations of laboratory [End Page 81] workers within her family. Gomez's careful work of both mining and expanding the existing archive of Nuevomexicana/o experiences of Los Alamos is one of this book's greatest strengths. She uses new interviews conducted with laboratory workers and their families, recorded interviews from the Los Alamos Historical Archives, and internal documents from the lab to establish that workers like Candelario Esquibel, Leo Guerin, Raymond Means, José Corsinio Cordova, Sevedro Lujan, Escolastico Martinez, and Leopoldo Pacheco, all killed in three explosions in the 1950s, were working at tasks more dangerous than their positions or training warranted. Thus, they were intentionally recruited as unwitting lab rats in the development of safer protocols.

These are vital histories, particularly framed against official histories that erase the wasting of life and theft of land by framing Nuevomexicana/o workers as "unsung heroes" of the nuclear age and the erasures and glamorizations of pop-cultural memory as exemplified in the television show Manhattan, to which she devotes an entire chapter. Throughout the book Gómez makes good on her promise to "highlight the ways that Nuevomexicanas/os were marginalized before, during, and after the Manhattan Project" (14).

The fourth chapter, "Environmental Racism in the Tularosa Basin," argues that environmental racism not only drove the locating of the Trinity test site near rural Hispanic communities but the subsequent exclusion of those communities from the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which covers Nevada Test Site downwinders and other uranium workers. When this work came to press, Trinity downwinders organized under the Tularosa Basin Downwinders' Consortium were working against time to win an expansion that would make them eligible for compensation under the RECA before the sunset provision ended new claims in July 2022. However, on June 7, 2022, President Biden signed the RECA Extension Act of 2022, moving the final date for claims to June 10, 2024. The possible claimants still do not include Trinity downwinders, so the work of the activists is identically positioned, and Gómez's book is as current and topical as ever. It is essential reading for anyone interested in American environmental history, anti-nuclear activism, and the Southwestern region. [End Page 82]

Carolyn Dekker Finlandia University Copyright © 2024 Western Literature Association ...