Painting at El Convento in Española, NM commemorating local contributions to the Manhattan Project

"It was an entirely different world," Eulalia "Eula" Quintana Newton remembered, describing life in the northern Rio Grande valley before the coming of the Manhattan Project. "Our lives changed entirely." 

The Manhattan Project had a profound impact on the communities of northern New Mexico. The Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF) has been collaborating with local partners to collect and publish interviews with residents of northern New Mexico about their experiences. 

In addition, AHF has worked with Willie Atencio and David Schiferl to publish a collection of interviews conducted with Manhattan Project participants from northern New Mexico in 2009. Atencio, a longtime employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Bradbury Science Museum, worked with retired LANL physicist David Schiferl to capture numerous interviews.

In 1942, Los Alamos was designated as the site for the Manhattan Project's top-secret scientific laboratory. Native Americans and Hispano homesteaders living on the Pajarito Plateau were forced to leave their lands. Victor and Refugio Romero, who lived in a log cabin seasonally on the plateau, were among the people displaced. "All of a sudden the Army declared, 'You can't come and plant any more over here. We're going to take over. The government wants your land,'" recalled Rosario Martinez Fiorillo, the Romeros' granddaughter. Today, visitors to Los Alamos can see the restored Romero Cabin.

Short of laborers, the Army Corps of Engineers recruited people from neighboring Hispano communities and Pueblos to help build the laboratory and residences. As the interviews document, the Army hired them as construction workers, janitors, housekeepers, technicians, clerks, mess hall staff, mail couriers, maids and other roles. Trucks and green Army buses stopped at the Hispano communities and the Pueblos each morning to pick up workers and take them to jobs on "the Hill," as Los Alamos was called.

"We all took a part  in it," remembered Esequiel Salazar , who worked as a carpenter an d surveyor. "I think it's important that people realize that the scientists couldn't do their jobs if it wasn't for the cement workers that were putting in the slabs and building their laboratories. The janitors, the laborers, the carpenters, everybody took a part in it."

The interviews include various perspectives on the Manhattan Project and its impact on northern New Mexico's communities. AHF is grateful to Willie Atencio and David Schiferl for their collaboration in publishing their interviews, and PAC 8 Community Media Center in Los Alamos for digitizing them. The project has also been funded in part by a grant from the Bonderman Southwest Intervention Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Los Alamos National Bank, and the Kerr Foundation.

On October 12 to 14, 2017, Northern New Mexico College and the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area are organizing a conference called "Querencia Interrupted: Hispano and Native American Experiences of the Manhattan Project." AHF is pleased to sponsor the event along with the Los Alamos National Bank. 

The conference will bring together scholars, writers and artists to reflect on the Manhattan Project and its impact. To register and for more information about the conference, click here.  AHF looks forward to the conference and continuing to work with local partners to capture the intertwined histories of the communities and the Los Alamos laboratory.

	Scientists using chemical separation methods to find mendelevium atoms.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has recently received a historic video showing some of the famous scientists who led the race to discover new chemical elements. The video depicts the discovery of mendelevium, or element 101, in 1955. Produced and narrated by  Claude Lyneis, a retired physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the video highlights the tools and techniques used by the scientists in their exciting discovery.  Click here to see the video.

Scientists have been looking for new elements for hundreds of years. When Dmitri Mendeleev organized the known elements according to a periodic, or repeating, system in the 1860s, there were gaps, elements not yet known but with properties that could be predicted by their relationship to close chemical neighbors. Mendeleev's table has since been expanded to incorporate new elements beyond those postulated by Mendeleev. Such elements include  uranium,  plutonium, and mendelevium.

The video depicts the discovery of mendelevium as reenacted by some of the same scientists who performed the experiments. It dramatically showcases the skill and speed required to synthesize the new element. These techniques put the Berkeley team at the forefront of elemental discovery. The work of Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso led to the discovery of over a dozen new elements, and helped to expand and change the shape of the periodic table, adding and filling in what is now the actinide series.

As of 2016, there are no longer any gaps in the first seven rows of the periodic table. Future expansion remains uncertain, but the search for new elements still continues to this day. The Atomic Heritage Foundation is grateful to Dr. Lyneis for his work and explanations of this revolutionary discovery.

To read the full article about the video and the discovery of mendelevium, click here.

	Charlotte Serber's Los Alamos ID photo.

-  The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project's Secrets : Atlas Obscura profiles Charlotte Serber, the head technical librarian at Los Alamos. She was the only female Division Leader at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.