New film First We Bombed New Mexico sheds light on effects of Oppenheimer’s nuclear project and locals’ battle for justice

Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández watched Oppenheimer – a top contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards and Christopher Nolan’s treatment on the physicist who guided testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico – months ago.

And soon after the scene where Cillian Murphy, as J Robert Oppenheimer, peered through safety goggles in a fortified shed at the huge mushroom cloud, the New Mexico Democrat realized “the untold story” lay on the cutting room floor.

“We see nothing on the impact the bomb had on people living in northern New Mexico,” Fernández said. “There’s no way [Manhattan Project physicists] could not have been aware of the radiation’s impact on the communities downwind of the Trinity bomb site.”

As a 17th-generation descendant of Mexicans who became New Mexicans, Fernández, 65, speaks of “people living off the land, hanging their clothes, coated with [radioactive] ash, chickens picking in the yard, the lingering effects of what fell onto the ground and crops and was absorbed by animals and people” – for decades to come after the testing of the bomb.