Nuclear Testing Claimed Lives in New Mexico. Decades Later, Resident Tina Cordova is Still Fighting for Justice.

Growing up in 1960s New Mexico, Tina Cordova was proud of the part her community played in the country’s defense.

Kids would go on elementary school field trips to the White Sands Missile Range, where the first nuclear bomb test, dubbed “Trinity,” took place.

“Families were allowed to picnic there,” Cordova says. “And people would come home with their pockets full of trinitite—a radioactive mineral formed by the explosion.”

The government told Cordova’s community they were perfectly safe. But, later, researchers found that infant mortality rates in Cordova’s hometown of Tularosa–just 45 miles from the nuclear test site–had spiked. Residents–including Tina’s father, Anastacio– began to die in cancer clusters. And today, Cordova is still fighting for the U.S. government to take responsibility.

“At first, the government didn’t even admit the explosion was caused by a nuclear device,” says Cordova. “And at the time, all of our food was produced at home. There were no grocery stores. No refrigeration. So, when radioactive ash fell from the sky for days, it got on everything. All of our water, vegetables, and livestock were contaminated along with the environment.”

The United States kept testing nuclear weapons in New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado through the early ’70s. But it wasn’t until 1990 that the government finally acknowledged the bombs they detonated during these tests had given people cancer. Even then, they only admitted to harming people downwind of a single test site in Nevada.

So, in 2005 Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinder’s Consortium, which aims to bring attention to the adverse health effects of the Trinity test’s radioactive fallout. Today, The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) —which has provided monetary support for those harmed by the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons—still fails to cover the communities around the Trinity test site.

“That’s why I’m still knocking on doors,” says Cordova, “taking health surveys and recording the stories of folks who’ve been poisoned by nukes.”

Slowly but surely, Cordova’s work has gained progress. In 2021, Senators from New Mexico and Idaho introduced a bill that would finally expand RECA to include the communities near the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

“Fallout plumes from nuclear tests spread literally thousands of miles,” says Cordova. “So the idea they would have somehow missed the communities directly surrounding the Trinity test site is unbelievable. There has to be a reckoning so people can heal and so the same mistakes aren’t made in the future. Until you’re ready to acknowledge the truth, you can’t move forward. We have to start having real conversations around what it means to continue to develop these weapons of mass destruction.”

Outrider’s #StopInvestingInDestrution video series showcases authentic voices from a diverse group of people adversely impacted by nuclear weapons. These stories humanize the harm of nukes through real people’s stories, grounding an issue that has been, for too long, perceived as something abstract, far away, and out of our control.