by Ernie McCray
I sat the other night
squirming in my seat
as a woman,
Tina Cordova,
a co-founder and executive director
of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium,
spoke about our country’s neglect
in respect
to protecting
people who suffered the effects
of the “Trinity Nuclear Test”
in New Mexico,
how since that day
in July, 1945,
very little has taken place
to compensate
for the lives
ruined by rare and aggressive cancers,
health problems that, to this day,
are still alive,
having impacted five generations
of families,
her family for one:
two great-grandfathers, both grandmothers, her dad, herself,
and now a niece in her 20’s,
to say nothing of the reality that
the areas near the test site
remain contaminated,
calling on Tina and colleagues
to meet regularly
with people across New Mexico
and other places like Arizona, Utah, Guam, and Idaho,
conducting health surveys
and lobbying Congress
to provide more restitution
than the paltry sums
the government has granted begrudgingly,
considering the fact
that so much has been taken from them
that they will never get back.
But the idea is to achieve
some level of restorative justice
and the work has yielded some modicum of additional compensation,
providing an emotional victory
that acknowledges “resilience, culture, and power of communities
uniting to reclaim their history
while exposing the racism and nuclear colonialism
that shaped New Mexico’s fate.”
Such a pursuit to correct
our country’s sins
against its own citizens
are now embedded
in a documentary entitled
“First We Bombed New Mexico,”
a reminder to us
to beware of
and to prepare
to stand against
nuclear testing
whenever it’s planned anywhere
because its effects
can last thousands of years.
Tina Cordova,
a new hero of mine,
has made that crystal clear.
