Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are three national parks, represented in an illustrated leaf. Underneath these symbols is the slogan “where discoveries are made.”

In 2021, New Mexico attracted 7.2 billion in tourist dollars. Many visitors come for the leaf: Outdoor recreation added $2.3 billion to the state’s economy that year. Meanwhile, the atom—the state’s nuclear past and present—attracts a subset of tourists who come to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Trinity test site, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. The most hardcore might also check out the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.

New Mexico is famously the “Land of Enchantment.” “Enchantment” is an abstract noun that evokes remoteness, isolation, and emptiness. It’s easy to see how environmental tourism seeks this out: It’s about sunset-chasing and finding peace in vast expanses of open desert. Nuclear tourism, meanwhile, is an extension of the military’s expansion into civilian life—the cultural arm of a national mission to continue making bombs. It consists of attractions that erase the deathly realities of nuclear events in favor of mythologies of noble actors doing difficult things for the sake of the U.S.’s democracy. But while these two types of tourism might seem opposed, in seeking enchantment, New Mexico’s visitors are oddly alike. In New Mexico, ogling nuclear weapons and enjoying nature are two sides of the same coin: Both activities conjure the state as a blank slate.

New Mexico began calling itself the “Land of Enchantment” in 1999, lifting its moniker from a 1906 travelogue about the Southwest. Author Lilian Whiting wrote that New Mexico was “a territory…whose ethnological interest” in the “remains of Cliff dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist,” and that its future “promises almost infinitely varied riches.”

Whiting saw New Mexico as the one of most “uncivilized localities” of the Southwest, replicating 20th-century attitudes that assumed Indigenous people were on the brink of vanishing. She described the region as unpopulated, but what she meant was that it hadn’t been settled by Anglo-Americans.

The contemporary earthy tourists that come to see White Sands, the Gila National Forest, or Shiprock caption their Instagram posts with similar language to Whiting’s. They’re exposed to the language and imagery of enchantment and emptiness by the state’s tourism campaign. Today, the slogan is “NM True,” but the vision it’s peddling is the same: star-studded vistas, mountains, forest, and sand dunes all empty and isolated. Vacancy—as an assumption that erases racialized communities—is central to enchantment.

The more complicated reality is that these seemingly empty destinations are products of multiple, contradictory layers of history: resource extraction, the seizure of land for national parks, and military land uses. Nowhere is this most apparent than at the seemingly empty sites visited by nuclear tourists.

In the 70 years since the Trinity site—where the Atomic Age’s first blast melted the sand in an explosion 1.5 times hotter than the surface of the sun on July 16, 1945—first held an open house, New Mexico has become ground zero for nuclear tourism. Army officials installed the obelisk of igneous rock marking Ground Zero in 1965. Today, it is a favorite spot for tourists to snap pictures. Officials designated the site and its grounds a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

In 1969, Congress established Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History “as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology.” Initially staffed by Air Force personnel, the institution is a testament to Cold War efforts to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm around nuclear science.

In Los Alamos, the operational laboratories are closed to the public, there are lots of visitor opportunities—including, since Christopher Nolan’s film, downloadable maps of filming locations and local “Project Oppenheimer” themed experiences that involve drinks, shopping, and sightseeing. Soon, the Los Alamos location of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park—comprised of three sites across the U.S. that played a significant part in developing the bomb—will open to the public. The weekend of Oppenheimer’s premiere, local news reported a “swell” of calls to the Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque and tourists “flocking” to Los Alamos.

Seeing the state as a giant playground for recreation and experimentation is not so different from conceiving of it as an amenity for private enjoyment. In both the nuclear and outdoors tourist economies, it pays to be empty. You can see this in Oppenheimer, much of whose plot turns on the title character’s lifelong yearning: “If only I could combine physics and New Mexico, then I’d truly be happy.”

What is he yearning for? Emptiness, it seems. Emptiness offers Oppenheimer freedom from harm, guilt, and accountability. At times, the film feels like an ad campaign for New Mexico’s nuclear tourism: the empty landscape is both a source for finding the secrets of the natural world and a key to a scientific revelation that functions as spiritual enlightenment. But there is no such thing as the frontier freedom that Oppenheimer thought New Mexico’s landscape promised.

Even attempts to dissuade viewers from romanticizing the events of the film reinforce emptiness. In New Mexico, a somber 15-second public service announcement from the Union of Concerned Scientists preceded screenings of Oppenheimer, reminding viewers that nuclear tests contributed to high rates of infant mortality, cancers, and the poisoning of soil and water. The PSA showed a landscape viewed from a passenger train. It evoked Oppenheimer’s ride to the town of Lamy in Nolan’s film, but also could have been Alamogordo, near the test site. The lack of specificity established the scenery as abandoned: modest discolored buildings, absence of people, the toll of a single bell in ambient natural sound.

The concerned scientists likely didn’t intend to glance over the people of New Mexico, but the PSA nevertheless reaffirmed the idea that the state is empty. Is this a result of the bomb’s devastation, or was it always the case? Who used to inhabit this space? Who still does?

Indigenous and Hispano New Mexicans who were present in the region long before Oppenheimer have been the most impacted by the lab. Many New Mexicans know “Downwinders”— residents of the rural Tularosa Valley downwind of the blast who have borne the brunt of the ecological, economic, and negative health outcomes from nuclear testing, but who have yet to receive any formal recognition or reparation from the U.S. government.

Despite those who profit from silence and emptiness, New Mexico is a land of testimony. This state is full of life and full of people who have dedicated their lives to holding each other close. Organizations like Tewa Women United, an all-volunteer organization founded in 1989 that seeks to create and foster spaces that center Indigenous women’s knowledge and health practices, speak to the specific ways the bomb has affected Indigenous communities in the state. The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe held an entire exhibition devoted to the topic in 2022, orienting viewers toward the global connections and hazardous histories that arise from the first blast of the Atomic Age in New Mexico’s desert.

Telling stories like these is what makes New Mexico a real place—not the empty “Land of Enchantment” packaged for tourists. When you visit, work towards listening, and you’ll begin to see past the vistas.

The post The New Mexico <i>Oppenheimer</i> Erases appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The submissions for 2020 (which came from as far away as Doha, Qatar) dove deep into the meaning of place to explore literal, fictional, and metaphorical geographies. Set in locations as different as Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock, and the lingerie department in Walmart, each poem demonstrated the power of place to anchor us in a shared conversation of what it means to be alive today.

This year’s winning poem, selected by the Zócalo editorial staff, won us over because of the way the poet’s distinctive voice guides us through the familiar scenery of the Southwestern U.S. The poem is a celebration of a person’s girlhood, and how it is shaped by such forces as family, religion, heritage, and location.

We’re thrilled to announce the Ninth Annual $500 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize goes to Jai Hamid Bashir. Her winning poem, “Little Bones,” combines specific places, such as a payphone in a gas station, with universal themes, such as childhood and growing up, the natural world, and family.

“Bashir’s work is beautiful, particularly in negotiating dichotomies—inner and external experiences, languages and landscapes, and feelings versus walking around in the world as a person,” says Zócalo poetry editor, Colette LaBouff.

Born to Pakistani-American immigrant artists, Bashir was raised in the Southwest and has spent many years advocating for climate justice and land conservation. A graduate of the Environmental Humanities program at the University of Utah, she is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University in the City of New York. The recipient of the Linda Corrente Memorial Prize at Columbia University and an Academy of American Poet’s University Prize, she has been published by The American Poetry Review, Palette Poetry, The Cortland Review, The Margins, Sierra Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, and others.

Bashir will deliver a public reading of her poem during Zócalo’s 10th annual Book Prize Lecture, which will be streamed online on May 20 at 5 PM PDT. Her poem “Little Bones” is below, followed by a conversation with Zócalo associate editor, Jackie Mansky.

Little Bones

In a chlorinated morning. White, wet noise
is everywhere, so it is endless. After the pool, we echo
for the gas station attendant to use the phone,

Salam. Ma don’t worry. In song of bleach and sun,
we spent an afternoon earnest in the creation
of nests woven from tall grass, netted wrappers
from lunch apples. From palm—to—palm

passing a dying field mouse with the slow
understanding of boudins sharing a spring
in the desert. There was love moving us forward,

interveled like pangs before birth, asking us
to breathe in certain ways. We took it home
and fed it formula with an old baby dropper

in the backyard, until Ma called our names
before the hard vesper air of sunset, before
salat, we set the unsaved animal in the shade

of our family tree—lightheaded in our own
untold plans for eternity.

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