A brilliant Twitter thread from Alisa Lynn Valdes, M.S., an author, journalist and film producer from New Mexico

This quote, from the @nytimes review of the OPPENHEIMER film: “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico”…

It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed.  

Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government.

All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not.

The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those people.

For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family’s land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too.

She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won.

The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state’s human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly.

But, no. We want more films about the “complex and troubled” “heroic” white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a “virtually unpopulated” place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as “nuanced.”

Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of Oppenheimer to be told.

Nolan, Hollywood, the NY Times – all of them should be ashamed. Someone should fund my Loyda Martinez film. She’s like @ErinBrockovich – bubbly, beautiful, was a cheerleader & computer genius. Loyda’s is the story we SHOULD be hearing. But we get Hot fucking Cheetohs. 

Loyda Martinez. KNOW HER NAME. One of the bravest and most important women in American history.