Before the Bomb, There Were Bean Fields

Myrriah Gomez, PHS grad, submitted this story. Gomez  attends the University of Texas at San Antonio where she is earning a PhD.

 Before the Lab, before the physicists built the atomic bomb, before Los Alamos grew into a fell-fledged city with a movie theater and a McDonald’s, there were bean fields. Lots of bean fields!

Durán. García. Gómez. Gonzáles. Grant. Luján. Montoya. Roybál. Serna. Vigíl. Those are the some of the names of the families that once owned land in present-day Los Alamos atop the Pajarito Plateau. In a small town like Pojoaque, family is very important, and many Pojoaque residents consider themselves fortunate to have a good job in Los Alamos to support their families. Ironically, many of us don’t know that our grandparents, great-grandparents, or even great-great-grandparents once owned land in Los Alamos.

My great-grandparents, Jose María and Delfina Serna owned 62 acres in present-day Los Alamos. They grew beans, wheat, and other crops, and like other Hispano families who farmed atop Pajarito, they lived in the valley. My grandparents were among those now referred to as “the Pajarito homesteaders.” Over 30 Hispano families lived year-round or seasonally in Los Alamos. During the remainder of the year, the families lived in El Rancho, Nambé, Jacona, Jaconita, and Española.

 Today, we’re familiar with the names Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves. Oppenheimer and Groves were two of the men who surveyed and chose Los Alamos as the site for the Manhattan Project. In addition to the ranchos, there was also the Los Alamos Ranch School, an elite boarding school for boys (imagine Harvard University, but for younger boys). Many rich and famous people throughout the country sent their sons to LARS to become strong in mind and body. The ranch school had enough buildings, the U.S. government thought, to secure a secret city for the physicists and their families who worked at Project Y, the name given to the Los Alamos portion of the Manhattan Project.

But the real problem came when the Hispanos were basically kicked off their land in order to accommodate the U.S. government’s secret project. Most of the Hispano families were paid $7 an acre for their land. Some landowners were not paid at all. The ranch school received a significantly larger sum for the boys school. There was nothing anyone could do. They could not fight it and few actually tried. The families were provided with Declarations of Taking, which forced them to immediately vacate their property. Many of them did not have enough time to bring their possessions back to the valley. Some residents were actually loaded into U.S. Marshal vehicles, driven down the hill, and dropped off in Totavi near where the gas station is today.

It’s reported that in 1943, the total value of all the land taken from the homesteaders was worth over $642,272. But there is no way anyone can put a number value on the loss of land, animals, equipment, crops, and homes for the homesteaders. It’s like those credit card commercials: 60 acres of land, X amount of dollars. Plough and horses, X amount of dollars. Practicing and passing down land and traditions, priceless. Unfortunately, the traditions of farming the Pajarito were lost to us.

Perhaps most significant to this story is that the government told the families that the land would be returned to them after the war. Obviously, this never happened. For years the homesteaders’ families have fought to have their land returned or to be repaid for the land that was taken from them. In 2006, thanks to the hard work of many individuals, some of the debt was finally repaid after a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Pajarito Plateau Homesteaders, Inc. But was it enough?

 This is the short version of this complicated story. For many reasons, our grandparents and tías and tíos chose to keep a lot of this a secret. Only recently have people begun to talk about this important part of our history. I encourage you to ask your family members what they know about Pajarito before 1942.

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For more on the class action lawsuit, visit http://www.kmklaw.com/f-1.html.

 A search for: lanl.the.rest.of.the.story.googlepages.com/Pajarito_Report_.pdf. will also give you a report entitled “Hispanic Homesteaders on the Pajarito Plateau: An Unconstitutional Taking of Property at Los Alamos 1942-1945,” written by Malcolm Ebright and Richard Salazar.

There is a growing amount of research regarding the Pajarito Plateau Homesteaders. I am also interested in talking to anyone who has stories to share regarding the Pajarito Plateau Homesteaders.