Nuclear Facultad
The Entanglement of Weapons Development
and Traumatic Violence in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Myrriah Gómez, Ph.D

University of New Mexico

Three days before American Thanksgiving in November 2018, I met a friend to run the trail along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We met early that morning, dressed in layers of clothing, and our breath instantly froze in the wintery cold. As we clipped along the path in the world’s largest cottonwood forest, we saw a person that appeared to be asleep on the ground, in the dirt and leaves. We noticed the person; we thought it was a man; we decided to leave them alone. Nearly an hour later, we ran by again. This time we noticed that the person had not moved, so we approached. With more light in the day now, we noticed that it was an Indigenous woman. We attempted to rouse her, but she neither moved her body nor her voice. We called 911, and soon there were fire trucks and police cars. The woman was dead. They took our statements and asked us to leave the scene, suspecting foul play. Several days later, we learned that they dismissed the suspicion of foul play and concluded that she froze to death. Yet, there was violence at play: systemic violence.

This experience haunted me for months, years even. Actually, this experience continues to haunt me today. I have begun to make connections between the systemic violence and the traumatic violence that is thrust upon New Mexican residents daily but built upon earlier layers of settler colonialism beginning when Spanish colonizers invaded la Nueva México. Today, many New Mexicans have borne witness to that traumatic violence. For others, it is thrust upon them via the media. I contend that this violence has developed, in part, based on the nuclear weapons industrial complex that now pervades New Mexico.

Chicana philosopher Gloria E. Anzaldúa defines the facultad as a sixth sense. She defines facultad as,

[T]he capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world. (1999, 60)
Violence that occurs in the shadows of a larger, looming nuclear violence occurs across New Mexico. The two nuclear laboratories in New Mexico— Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—cast long shadows across the state. But not everyone is making those connections.

Not everyone sees the weapons production happening within the Labs or how that can possibly be tied to the violence happening outside of the fenced-in facilities. Anzaldúa claims that “Confronting anything that tears the fabric of our everyday mode of consciousness and that thrusts us into a less literal and more psychic sense of reality increases awareness and la facultad” (1999, 61). Photographs force us to confront the way the nuclear facilities should be tearing at our consciousness, but most Americans are removed from thinking about the effects of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, many Americans are intimately familiar with the effects of nuclear weapons, whether that be through uranium mining, weapons production, weapons storage, weapons testing, or weapons production waste. Those people are excruciatingly aware and haunted by their experiences. In the nuclear facultad, New Mexicans experience that acute sensing that weapons development in our state has brought about pain, contamination, and violence. It has also resulted in a capitalist economy that many people now benefit from. That capitalist economy has replaced the moral economy that once operated here and struggles to remain intact today.

A literal structure of nuclear weapons sits below the earth’s surface in Albuquerque. Most New Mexicans are unaware that the largest nuclear weapons storage facility in the entire world exists on a fifty-four-acre site within the boundaries of the Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB). Barbed wire and armed guards prevent the public from accessing KAFB, but at the end of Prairie Road is located the site known as the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex (KUMMSC). Some people might consider it a “don’t ask, don’t tell” topic, meaning that no one denies its existence, but its invisibleness haunts New Mexico. It looms large, approximately 2,000 nuclear weapons large, even if the exact number of weapons stored is a government secret. In 1994, the federal government pulled the nuclear weapons from within the Manzano Mountains in Albuquerque and placed them in KUMMSC, estimated to be the size of six football fields combined. Each weapon sits in a cubicle-like structure the size of an average-sized house in Albuquerque. And there they sit, waiting to be used, or not. Worldwide, humans hope they will never be used.

Perhaps the uncanny part of KUMMSC is that a bird’s eye view of the area looks empty, desolate, uninhabited. This is the biggest lie the government has told about New Mexico. In fact, the same way that the earth cradles the nuclear weapons, the larger New Mexico is home to a majority population comprised of Indigenous and Hispanic peoples. Many of those people are unaware of the nuclear weapons storage facility. As for the people who know about KUMMSC, they can be divided into two groups: those who have normalized the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and those who refuse to normalize weapons that contain the capacity to destroy life.

The haunting of New Mexico is a layering of violence that has historically occurred on these lands. The violence that occurs today cannot be detached from the eighty-year history of nuclear weapons development in New Mexico. When we hear or see traumatic violence, we must train ourselves to question the systemic violence taking place behind the fences of the nation’s national nuclear facilities. Rather than being haunted forever by these images, we must tap into that facultad and confront the entanglement of violence in Albuquerque. This entanglement is not normal, and we cannot allow it to govern life and livelihood in New Mexico. The structure of the nuclear industrial complex and the systemic violence that occurs alongside it are specters, both apparitions and sources of fear. The potential for nuclear weapons to end all life haunts humans, but with the vast number of nuclear weapons stored in the largest metropolitan city in New Mexico, this cultural landscape is constantly haunting us, evolving into a nuclear hauntology.