A different perspective
Director, choreographer collaborate with Tularosa Downwinders in ‘Doctor Atomic’
New Mexico is front and center as the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
In 1945, history was made with the first detonation at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico.
This is where the story of “Doctor Atomic” takes place.
The opera is part of the 2018 Santa Fe Opera season. It premieres July 14.
First performed in 2005, the work reunites composer John Adams with librettist and stage director Peter Sellars.
“Doctor Atomic” begins in Los Alamos during the summer of 1945, leading up to the detonation at the Trinity Site, just outside of Alamogordo.
Tina Cordova is a cofounder of The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which formed 13 years ago.
The organization’s mission is to seek justice for the unknowing and uncompensated participants of the July 16, 1945, Trinity test in southern New Mexico. Many have developed cancer, including Cordova, who battles thyroid cancer. She was diagnosed at age 39.
The Downwinders have been working with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Santa Fe Community Foundation to conduct a New Mexico Health Equity Study.
“It was a long study that was supervised by the New Mexico Department of Health,” Cordova says. “Through all this process, we’ve been able to file all the information we’ve received from people who are affected.”
Cordova will be heading to Washington, D.C., at the end of June to plead her case in front of a Congressional committee.
“I’ve been waiting years to be heard,” she says. “No one has gotten any help or compensation. The test was in our back yard and it has altered the DNA of the people down here.”
“Doctor Atomic” choreographer Emily Johnson heard Cordova on the radio and contacted Sellars about involving the organization.
“She told Peter that they really shouldn’t do this opera without including our story,” Cordova says. “I had lunch with the two of them in March and they talked about including downwinders’ stories within the opera.”
Thus, when the opera takes the stage in July, Cordova and others will be included in the telling of “Doctor Atomic.”
“It’s because we’ve been spreading the word that we’re getting noticed,” Cordova says. “There were 10,000 people living next to the test site. We had communities within that 50-mile radius and their genetics were changed. We’ve been working all these years to bring attention to this and get the government to acknowledge that they damaged people. There’s a reason they never tested a bomb 100 feet off the ground again. They learned at Trinity this was a bad practice.”