Gabe Vasquez

I have a photograph from 1962 of my family in the corral on our ranch, Hereford cattle behind them. Five of the six adults in it would get cancer.

We have ranched this land for six generations; my grandchildren are the sixth. We are 20 miles straight north of the Trinity Site. There is a downwinders map on U.S. 380 now, and our place sits in the red.

On the morning of July 16, 1945, my great-grandmother woke up certain the house was on fire. That was how bright it was inside. She, my father and my uncle ran outside and saw the light and the mushroom cloud. Soldiers had been moving through by the hundreds all summer; they already had suspicions.

Not long after, the cattle began turning white. However an animal was standing when the bomb went off, that side lost its color. A Hereford standing broadside came out half white and half red.

The federal government paid those ranchers for their livestock in 1945. It took 80 more years to acknowledge what it did to the families standing next to them.

My great-grandmother, who thought the house was burning, died of a rare leukemia. My uncle, who stood in that yard as a boy, believed he had brain cancer and took his own life rather than live through it. His wife died of brain cancer. My father ended up with cancer under his tongue.

My mother raised five children, went back to school, earned a doctorate degree in physiology and spent her career in cancer research. She died in 2024 with three cancers, all on the government's own list of radiation-linked illnesses: thyroid, ovarian and what we believe reached her pancreas. Cancer took her anyway.

My brother was born blind in one eye. The law does not consider that. It asks only whether you were in the right place at the right time with the right disease. It does not ask what got handed down.

For decades, the downwinders stood at the Stallion turnoff whenever the Trinity Site opened, holding signs while cars went by. Nothing would have changed without them.

In July 2025, Congress passed the largest expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. New Mexicans downwind of Trinity finally became eligible — the government's first admission that it harmed us. Most of the people it was written for are already dead. My mother-in-law is 85 and has had breast cancer twice. I am helping her file her claim now. I hope she lives to see it paid.

The RECA expansion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed the House 218-214.

Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., voted no, along with the rest of New Mexico’s congressional delegation. Vasquez voted no in May, and again on final passage. Four votes. If it had gone the other way, my mother-in-law would be filing nothing.

Now he is coming to Alamogordo on Aug. 12 to promote a movie about downwinders and try to claim he supports victims like my family. We know better.

You can talk about something, or you can do something about it. They are not the same. He could have voted for it. He chose not to.

The government picked the Jornada del Muerto because somebody decided there was nothing out there. I have a photograph of that “nothing.” Nine people standing in the dirt, cattle behind them, no idea what was already in them.

Dawn Weaver lives on her family's ranch 20 miles north of the Trinity Site.