Downwinders: The Forgotten Stories of America’s First Atomic Bomb

Text & photos by Sofie Hecht

September 17, 2025

Outside the White Sands Missile Range, Bernice shows me her bracelet. “It turns purple near radiation,” she says. We are just 12 miles away from site of the world’s first atomic bomb test (nicknamed “Trinity”) and the bracelet’s beads are already turning violet under the heat of this April morning Sun.

Each year, the White Sands Missile Range opens the Trinity site up to the public to commemorate the 1945 atomic bomb test that paved the way for the technology that would soon-after be used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Community members from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC) peacefully protest on the highway outside the site’s entrance every year to call attention to their stories of radiation exposure and provide information to the hundreds of tourists entering the site. Eighty years later, the TBDC still tirelessly fights for recognition from the federal government after being systematically erased from popular understandings of American history. The New Mexico downwinders were finally included this year in the federal compensation bill for those affected by radiation exposure after decades of advocacy and political pressure by TBDC and community partners.

The blockbuster film Oppenheimer (2023) won numerous awards for its depiction of the Manhattan Project and gained critical acclaim worldwide, but failed to mention the local consequences of the test. Despite numerous attempts from TBDC to contact the filmmakers, the film did not represent any of the New Mexico downwinders, the uranium miners on the Navajo Nation who were the first communities to be impacted by the atomic age, or the families on the Pajarito Plateau who the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) violently displaced to build the labs.

Half a million people lived within a 150-mile radius of Trinity in 1945 and Trinity’s residual fallout traveled as far as Canada, Mexico, and 46 U.S. states. Only 15% of the plutonium in the bomb fissioned, while the remaining radioactive fallout blew downwind into surrounding communities and seeped into the soil. Residents of the area described black ash raining down, cows turning white, and white snow-like debris falling from the sky that children rubbed on their faces and caught on their tongues until they realized it was too hot to be snow. Individuals were not warned or evacuated, and exposure rates in the area were “10,000 times higher than currently allowed.”

Bernice Gutierrez was born eight days after Trinity was detonated just 30 miles away from her home in Carrizozo, NM. Unlike many other infants born around this time, Bernice survived. In the area, infant mortality rates spiked immediately following the bomb.

As a member of TBDC, Bernice joins the group’s peaceful protests, helps host their annual commemoration event to recognize lives lost to cancer and other radiogenic illnesses, educates high school classrooms about her and her family’s experience growing up near Trinity, advocates for politicians to support the downwinders, and researches the impact of radiation exposure on her family and community.

At Bernice’s Albuquerque home one day in late Spring 2023, Bernice shows me a large folder of loose papers compiling years of her research. In it is a list of the names of dozens of her relatives. Thirty-four names are highlighted in red to indicate that they died of or survived cancer. Ten more have experienced an illness related to radiation exposure, such as thyroid disease.

Bernice also brings out her bracelet and corrects her prior statement. The bracelet actually reacts to the Sun’s ultraviolet rays, not the kind that would be in the soil around Trinity, and she had only ever worn it outside of the house to the Trinity site. She laughs as she realizes it’s not a great metric for detecting radiation in the area. But this new information becomes background noise to the blur of names on the page of brothers, sisters, cousins, and nieces that she has lost. Bernice is a thorough researcher and even if the bracelet doesn’t read radiation in the soil where she grew up, “my family history proves it,” she says. As a protective measure, Bernice had her thyroid removed because so many of her family members had thyroid cancer or diseases.

Lists like Bernice’s, of family members dead or sick from cancer, are common in this area. Most people I talk to within the 50-mile radius from Trinity have some experience of grieving for a close loved one or neighbor. Fellow TBDC member Ray Sanchez from the La Luz community 55 miles away from ground zero describes it succinctly, “they are taking casualties every day…the people are still dying out there of cancer.”

New Mexico has been described as the “cradle to grave” site for the country’s nuclear pipeline because it contains all aspects of the nuclear process from uranium mining to waste storage, something the state and its people cannot afford. Thirty-eight percent of New Mexico’s population are enrolled in Medicaid and New Mexico has a poverty rate of 17.8%, higher than the national average. New Mexicans across the state struggle with access to quality education, healthy food options, and basic social services.

Atmospheric nuclear testing invokes extreme damage to our environments and the people who steward these lands as an extension of the goals of settler colonialism—the removal of people to build a new settler state—that has been active for hundreds of years. Though many downwinders identify as nuevomexicanos (and are not Indigenous), Indigenous communities living in what is now New Mexico have been violently displaced and contaminated by the process of “nuclear colonialism.”¹ Members of the San Idelfonso Pueblo were removed from the Pajarito Plateau to build Los Alamos National Laboratory and now communities living near Los Alamos are fighting the lab’s tritium venting that will severely contaminate local water supplies. The Navajo Nation was targeted for the development of thousands of uranium mines from the 1940s to 1990s and now over 500 abandoned uranium mines idly wait for government cleanup efforts as communities continue to get sick.

Settler colonialism is the means to its own end and was never sustainable—just look at the climate apocalypse we are in, largely influenced by American energy consumption. Settler colonialism severs relational ties to land that allow for life, creativity, and sustainable futures for human and non-human relatives. Instead, settler (and nuclear) colonialism relies on relations to land that deem it as a property or resource, something from which to extract, own, manage, and ultimately damage.²

The toxicity of settler colonial land relations reaches deep, snaking into and under all parts of life. It creates challenges to survival for the many communities suffering material contamination: the hundreds of miles it takes to drive to a cancer treatment facility, the fear of raising children in contaminated zones, the distrust of one’s homelands and a distorted connection to land and water, the grief of watching one’s own child die.

And yet, this is not a story of pure suffering. These violent histories are also rich chronicles of resistance, creativity, life, and survival. The worst aspects of these regimes will continue as the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and the destruction of Indigenous communities in the Southwest through nuclear contamination. And still, the water runs; the trees grow taller; the roots reach down; leaves rest on the surface of the underground before they decompose to begin another life cycle. The earth teaches us. People still fight.

Downwinders Doris Walters and Bernice Gutierrez still print pictures to add to their family photo albums to make sure death by forgetting will never be possible in their families. Tina Cordova leads the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium while working a full time job and pressuring politicians to include the downwinders in important legislation, students still raise their eyebrows as they learn about New Mexico’s histories and rush back home to tell their families what they have learned.

These are some of these stories, of faith, of persistence, of memory, of life cut too short, of community endurance.

1. Gomez, M. (2022) Nuclear Nuevo Mexico, University of Arizona Press. ↩︎
2. Curley, A. (2021). Resources is just another word for colonialism. In The Routledge handbook of critical resource geography (pp. 79-90). Routledge. ↩︎