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 Native Americans performing burial rites.
But there were homesteaders living on that land.
In 1942, the U.S. army gave 32 Hispanos 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
