The University of Arizona Press
When: July 19, 2023, 6 p.m. MDT
Where: The Bleachers at New Mexico State University Art Museum, University and Solano Avenues, Las Cruces, NM
Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México will speak on a panel, “Artists and Authors on Our Nuclear Legacy,” at New Mexico State University. The panel is in conjunction with the exhibitions Cara Despain: Specter and The Branigan Cultural Center’s juried show Trinity: Legacies of Nuclear Testing. Join a panel of artists and authors who have influenced the conversation around nuclear weapons testing and production in the Southwest. Other panelists include moderator Alicia Inez Guzmán, author Joshua Wheeler, and artist Cara Despain.
In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists developed the atomic bomb. Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed from their ranches and sacred land in north-central New Mexico with inequitable or no compensation.
Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.
