Hispanics

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Frank Armijo as he shares memories growing up in Pasco, his joy and passion in the work that he accomplished at Hanford, and advice for youth. Frank Armijo’s parents were initially migrant farm workers from Texas who had met in Walla Walla. On one of the family’s work trips to the state, Frank’s dad, Rosalio, picked up additional work with a construction company that brought the family to Tri-Cities around the early-1960s.

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Michelle Molina as she shares memories of living in Ecuador with friends and family as well as adjustments she made in her move to the Tri-Cities as a teenager in 2009. Many of the ways Michelle found community in the Tri-Cities was connecting with other students who had roots outside the United States. Her involvement with the International Club at Hanford High School was a definitive moment in her life.

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Magdaleno Gamboa as he shares memories from his experiences in the Army, where he was stationed in Germany and trained as a mechanic. After serving in the Army, Magdaleno eventually found work at Hanford, doing overhauls on buses, trucks, and large vehicles. Magdaleno spent about twenty years as a mechanic at Hanford from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Carlos Leon. Carlos holds strong roots in multiple communities of Eastern Washington, having been born in Toppenish in the 1950s and living in the Tri-Cities for over fifty years. At the age of twenty-one, Carlos became the first Latino reactor operator to work at Hanford.

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Ruben Lemos as he shares his experiences growing up as a child of migrant farm workers. During the 1950s, Ruben and his family traveled year-round to places for work in Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona. Ruben remembers picking strawberries in the Skagit Valley, asparagus in the Yakima Valley, and cotton in Arizona.

Listen to clips from an oral history interview with Adán as he shares his experiences living with his family in Pasco, Washington for nearly a half of century. Embodying a lifelong commitment to giving back to his community, Adán excelled in education and eventually became an educator and counselor at Pasco High School and Columbia Basin College after working at Hanford for seven years.

The Manhattan Project at Hanford and the Tri-Cities looked like many areas of the American South during the 1940s. Practices of segregation, discrimination, and racism were embedded into the fabric of workplace and community. Latinos/as who were recruited to Hanford for the Manhattan Project experienced prejudice and segregation. Their presence in the workforce and community demonstrates how race, ethnicity, and gender impact demographics across the Tri-Cities then and now.

In 1964 Maria Nicasio arrived in Prosser, Washington hoping to start a new life with her parents and siblings. She got a job as a farm worker in the asparagus crops. Maria worked near the Yakima River. She also drank from and bathed in it and ate the raw asparagus and other crops they were harvesting. She did not know it at the time but living and working as agricultural laborers near the plutonium production facility at Hanford would have severe health consequences.

Los Alamos National Laboratory was created to develop the atomic bomb. The government decided on Los Alamos County in New Mexico as a site for the Manhattan Project. Most of the land already belonged to the government as part of the Forest Service, but there was a community of Hispanic homesteaders and other property owners in the area. The homesteaders received less than their Anglo counterparts for their land. In 2005, they received reparations for the unfair treatment.

Luis Alvarez played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project, from working at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab, to working at the secret Los Alamos laboratory, to observing the Hiroshima bombing from a B-29 Superfortress. Learn more about his life and work at the link.