on the atom bomb
i was in middle school when i learned who oppenheimer was. it was a casual mistake. we were assigned a research paper. i had been reading hemingway’s war novels and looking up books on WWII. i didn’t find oppenheimer first. somehow, the middle school library had an entire shelf on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. the books were about the horrors of the atom bomb and the survivors of the bombings. they were old tattered books, hard covered and red bound, with a barely discernable title. i began reading, growing sicker and sicker. even as a middle school child, i had already witnessed racialized violence. i grew up in rural texas during the 80s and 90s. my town was mostly made up of white farm families, a growing number of migrants from Mexico, and a few Black families. the Laotion family that would open a Chinese Thai fusion restaurant in the abandoned Dairy Queen hadn’t arrived yet, nor had the Vietnamese family that would open a nail salon next to the credit union building. My dad and mom had both grown up in this place. Dad arrived in the late 60s, migrating from South Texas as my grandfather was a cowboy who eventually became a John Deere mechanic and followed the work where the tractors were. Mom and her siblings arrived in a Ford pick up from Chihuahua in the late 50s, before JFK was assassinated. they lived on a farm outside of town. both dad and mom represented two demographics split in this place: the Tejano and the Mexican.
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