This story was originally published by Source New Mexico. Find that publication here.
The July 16, 2025 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test arrives in New Mexico at a poignant moment, and serves as just one example of the state’s nuclear legacy. Generations of survivors of the federal government’s nuclear testing program and the state’s uranium mining industry have waited for years for recognition from the United States as they watched their friends and families die from cancers.
The 1990 federal Radiation and Exposure Compensation Act — created to provide restitution to people sickened by exposure to radiation and uranium — excluded New Mexico’s downwinders and post-1971 uranium miners, and expired last year after years of lobbying for expansion by victims and New Mexico’s elected leaders. New Mexico Democratic U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, for instance, began introducing RECA legislation when he was first elected to the U.S. House in 2008, and did so so every year since.
Just last month, Luján, other members of the state’s congressional delegation and long-time advocates held a news conference to call for RECA’s renewal once again. Over the years, the coalition calling for RECA’s expansion and extension has grown across states and become a bipartisan effort. In the end, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri got it over the finish line as a provision in President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill.
Advocates and New Mexico officials say while RECA’s passage is worthy of celebration, more remains to be done.
“It was quite a relief, because we’ve waited so long,” said Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, during a news conference last week. The documentary film First We Bombed New Mexico highlights Cordova’s 20-year fight for justice for New Mexico’s downwinders. “Honestly, the acknowledgement is long past due,” she said. “But I also want to recognize…that we’re not there yet. We still have a lot of work to do.”
RECA’s two-year expansion “will not be long enough for us to get everybody enrolled that should be enrolled,” Cordova said. The bill also provides $100,000 lump sum payouts but no longer includes health care coverage. “We will take the win, and we will continue our fight,” Cordova said. “And we will also never forget that there are some very important people that have been left out: the people of Guam, the people of Colorado, the people of Montana, the remainder of Arizona and Nevada.” While grateful New Mexico was included, she said, “we will continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our sisters and brothers from those places who we’ve come to love.”
Luján and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) last week also sent letters to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer urging both to issue guidance quickly for RECA given the short timeline for compensation.
Later on Wednesday, a sign dedication will take place at the entrance to the Trinity site, placing a marker there “acknowledging the sacrifice and suffering of the people of New Mexico as a result of the Trinity bomb,” Cordova said. A mass in the evening in Tularosa will include the annual candlelight vigil and reading of the names of the people who are no longer here. Source will have coverage from both events.
In advance of the 80th anniversary, Luján issued a statement about the anniversary, characterizing it as “eight decades of pain, loss, and injustice for the victims still living with the fallout of nuclear testing and uranium mining…As we reflect on the lasting harm caused by these tests and the government’s negligence, we must renew our commitment to the people still suffering today. That means doing everything we can to help them access the compensation they deserve. Together, we will keep fighting to make sure no one is left behind.”
Below, Source’s Danielle Prokop offers portraits of some of those survivors.
—Julia Goldberg
Tina Cordova
Tina Cordova has relived the death of her father, Anastacio, many times over. In speeches before a handful of people, in phone conversations with reporters and when Luján commemorated her father on the Senate floor of Congress on March 7, 2024.
Anastacio’s story starts in Tularosa in 1945. He was just 4-years-old when the federal government detonated the first atomic bomb in the Jornada Del Muerto desert 45 miles away. Like many people living there, he drank water from open cisterns, ate local crops and hunted wildlife for food — all likely contaminated with ash from radioactive fallout.
Cordova’s voice only shakes a little as she recounts his death from 12 years ago: He whittled away to 125 pounds, the pain he was in, the months on a feeding tube. He was diagnosed with two rare oral cancers and prostate cancer — all compensable under RECA, except the program excluded the New Mexicans living downwind from the first-ever bomb.
Cordova, 64, said her dad’s death also gave her clarity. She’s a cancer survivor herself and founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005 to advocate for southern New Mexicans impacted for generations by the legacy of Trinity.
“I chose to do this work. I know it’s my life’s work. I know I’m suited to do this work, and I’m grateful that I’ve had this opportunity,” she told Source NM.
With the recent extension of RECA, her father will finally be recognized as a downwinder and her mother may finally receive compensation on his behalf.
“My dad should still be here;$100,000 pales in comparison to who he was, and who he used to be to us,” she said. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, I don’t want to minimize what it means, but that’s not justice. That’s the beginning of justice — it’s a step forward in the right direction.”
Cordova said she’ll take the fight back to Congress to expand benefits to states and territories that were left out and require the government to pay to cover health care costs for people exposed.
She said that in the last year, her niece was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and her youngest brother with kidney cancer.
“This just doesn’t end for us,” Cordova said. “These are the people that we can never stop fighting for. These are the people that we can never allow to be forgotten, to just basically be treated as the human collateral damage.”
Larry and Arlene Juanico
Just under the mesa, past the horno outside of Arlene Juanico’s childhood home, lie the remains of the Jackpile uranium mine, once the largest in the world. Nearly 60 miles outside of Albuquerque, the holes appear on Laguna Pueblo lands between the red and white striated mesas, nearly abutting the little village of Paguate.
With the rush for nuclear arms during the Cold War and the domestic expansion of nuclear power, the federal government was seeking to purchase uranium. A thick belt of ore snaked from Navajo Nation lands through Grants and into Laguna Pueblo. The mine operated from 1951 to 1984, marring the landscape. Tracks from the trucks wind through the valley. Entire mesas now have a terraced effect from the strip-mining. After the rain, there comes the smell: a sharp, metallic smell of uranium.
Life in the village before the closure was punctuated by blasts from the mine site, scattering light yellow dust across the landscape.
“When they blasted, everything shook, our homes rattled,” she said. “Often the ladies would run out to get the laundry, get whatever meat or fruit would be drying in the yards.”
Like her father and brother — who later died from cancers — Arlene Juanico worked at the mine. She drove the water truck on the narrow roads, making good money at what she thought was a good job for a single mother. Her husband Larry Juanico also worked at the mine, then transferred to the Bluewater Mill, where the ore was processed into yellowcake uranium, with minimal safety precautions. People packed uranium into 55-gallon drums with their bare hands. He’d have to clean bins by climbing into them and scrubbing them with a brush, no masks, no suits.
Since they worked after 1972, the Juanicos and other uranium miners and millers did not qualify for RECA, even as many died or were sickened by exposure from radiation. But even now, the recognition or compensation from RECA is paltry to the devastation left by the mine, he said.
“Our people, our animals, our culture, our way of life are all affected by what’s happened here. The money part of it is good, but it’ll only last for a certain amount of time,” Larry Juanico said. “After all that’s gone — we’ll still be dealing with this.”
After the mine’s closure, the waste it left behind leaked uranium and other metals into the surface water and released radon, a cancer-causing gas, into the air and people’s homes. Clean up by the federal government remains unfinished.
The Juanicos said federal efforts to restart uranium mining in the area are insulting to the people sickened by exposure.
“They haven’t been taking care of us, but they want to start new mines,” Arlene Juanico said. “That will force the next generation to still fight for what the federal government still hasn’t lived up to.”
Paul Pino
Paul Pino, a retired schoolteacher, was in a daze for several days after Congress passed RECA on July 3, saying the July 4th weekend passed in a haze.
“I’m feeling two very different things,” he said. “On one hand, totally ecstatic, like over the moon, the best feeling of victory and happiness I’ve ever had in my life. On the other, I feel terrible for the people who’ve been left out from the bill; they needed the compensation also.”
Pino was born nine years after Trinity, but his mother, big brother and two older sisters were living on his family’s Carrizozo ranch, only 54 miles from the test site. His mother survived bouts of skin cancer, but died from bone cancer – selling her pickup to pay for her funeral costs just before her death. His older brother Greg died from stomach cancer, while one sister had breast cancer and the other suffered from several brain tumors.
“It was 100% devastation to my family,” he said.
Pino joined the steering committee at the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to fight for compensation for New Mexicans impacted by Trinity.
“All my life, plus more, people in New Mexico still have been waiting for some peace,” he said. “They got it on the 80th anniversary. It’s better late than never, you know?”
Pino performs a song titled “It Ain’t Over ‘til We Win,” about the downwinders’ struggle. He recently changed the lyrics of the last line: “Yeah we won, and it’s still not over.”
“But that’s all right,” he said. “You know it’ll be a good fight.”
Phil Harrison
Uranium mining was supposed to be a good job, not a death sentence. But for hundreds of people on the Navajo Nation, it was just that, said former uranium miner Phil Harrison.
“There was no warning of the dangers,” Harrison told Source NM. “They took advantage of us.”
Harrison, 74, is an advocate with the Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, a grassroots group formed in the 1970s as rising deaths and injuries rose among Navajo Nation uranium workers. He grew up in Cove, Arizona where 32 Ker-McGee Corporation mines operated from the 1940s to the 1980s. He was an underground uranium worker and remediated sites near Tuba City.
He lost his father at age 44 to lung cancer, after 20 years working in the mines. His father was part of a spate of men on the Navajo Nation dying from lung diseases and various cancers, 400 former uranium workers died in Cove and Red Valley alone.
“It wasn’t just the miners. Spouses and children who were also getting contaminated and exposed to radiation,” he said.
The grassroots group was one of the first to file lawsuits seeking compensation from the federal government, which led to Congress establishing RECA in 1990 and expanding the program in the 2000s.
The two-year window for the RECA expansion offers little time to collect the necessary documentation and visit doctors, sometimes out of state. For former uranium workers who are now eligible, that could mean difficulties since many rely on oxygen, are hospitalized or rely on assisted living and family caretakers.
“We have to get started right away,” he said. “Time is of the essence.”
Bernice Gutierrez
Bernice Gutierrez, 80, nearly shares a birthday with the Trinity Anniversary, born in Carrizozo only eight days before the blast. Her family moved to Albuquerque just a few years after the test, but health concerns followed. Gutierrez documented 41 members of her family experiencing some form of sickness, including 23 members with cancers. Seven have died as a result, including her son from pre-leukemia in 2020.
She’s documented health issues among downwinders and their descendants post-Trinity test for more than a decade, volunteering with the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.
Gutierrez called the passage “bittersweet,” as the short extension of RECA came inside a bill that cuts food assistance and medical care programs for low-income residents, which New Mexico relies heavily on.
“If the Medicaid cuts come to pass, it’s going to put people here in a world of hurt,” she said.
Gutierrez said there’s only two short years to extend the program, while trying to enroll folks who never qualified before, meaning a lot of work for the volunteers ahead.
“It was not the victory that we had hoped for, but one that we’re happy to get. It’s a starting point for us, but a point that we will continue working on to change,” Gutierrez said.
