In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Rosalie Manzaneres and her family lived in a neighborhood near what is now the Powerhouse in Durango. There were nearly 20 homes, neighbors with gardens and chickens, and children running around. Today, there’s a river trail and fire department where her childhood neighborhood once stood. In the mid-century, this neighborhood was called La Planta.
“La Planta is like the plant. They named the neighborhood the Planta [because of the Power Plant],” said Rosalie Manzanares.
La Planta was a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. Many of the people who lived there came from northern New Mexico. Manzanares says she can trace her family’s ancestry through the Southwest to Spanish colonizers from the 1700s.
“When people tell me ‘Go home.’ I say, 'I am home,'" said Manzanares
Manzanares’ family eventually moved to Durango for sheep herding and mining. They settled in La Planta, a working-class neighborhood along the Animas River in the 1950s.
“We lived here 15 years. We had the only house with running water and a toilet,” Lydia Manzanares, Rosalie’s mother, said.
In the 1960s, the greater Durango community had running water and electricity, but La Planta lacked those amenities. All the neighbors had their own port-a-potties next to their homes. And most of the homes weren't painted. The homes were situated right along the Animas River.
Rosalie says those years were hard for the family, but they were idyllic, too. Her father would fish in the river and feed the community, and she could hear the river from her bedroom
“I could fall asleep so easy, 'cause you'd hear the water hitting the rocks all night long, and that was just very comforting,” said Manzanares. “And I missed it for many, many years, so even just sitting here now listening to (it), I wanna see my dad out there fishing, but he's not there.”
La Planta wasn’t the only working-class neighborhood along the river. Chihuahua, where the skatepark and pickleball courts are today, and the Santa Rita neighborhood, where present-day Santa Rita Park is, also existed. Many of Manzaneres’ extended family also lived in these neighborhoods. But in the late 1960s, all of these neighborhoods were turned into parks, displacing these communities.
It’s hard to find records of when the La Planta neighborhood was dismantled. But in 1964, the residents of Chihuahua (where the present-day pickleball courts are located) were given 30 days to leave their homes, according to an article in the Durango Herald archives.
The article called the residents ‘squatters’, even though many families owned their homes or paid rent. Manzaneres’ aunt lived there during this time. By the spring of 1965, the former Chihuahua neighborhood had become an RV park. Rosalie’s immediate family had moved to California for work a few years before the evictions. So she didn’t witness these events, but she and her mother Lydia saw the impact on the family.
“It's sad to think that all that we had is all gone, you know. Everything's changed. Everything's changed. The town has changed,” she said.
In 2022, Rosalie's father died of brain cancer. But he isn’t the only person in her family who has had cancer. Rosalie has more than15 family members who have died of various illnesses and cancers over the years. Her aunt was diagnosed with Lupus when she was 14 while living at La Planta. She lost a kidney and died when she was 26 in the early 1970s.
These neighborhoods sat beneath a coal power plant, across the river from a uranium mill, and along the Animas River. It was historically also a dumping site for all the hard-rocking upstream in the San Juan Mountains. Rosalie’s family ate fish and swam in the river during this era.
According to the Durango Herald, Durango city council issued an eviction notice for residents in the area. It was part of a cleanup program turning the areas along the river into parks.
“If the whole town of Durango was sort of an environmental sacrifice zone, they were the ground zero of that sacrifice zone because they were right there in the center of it,” said Jonathan Thompson, an award-winning journalist and author who covers energy development and pollution in the Southwest. His book, The River of Lost Souls, documents the Animas River’s extractive mining past.
“The riverside was not like the beautiful parks and sort of soul of the town; back then it was the industrial heart,” said Thompson.
In 1943, the Durango Uranium Mill was secretly built along the Animas River for the Manhattan Project. During the Cold War, the Vanadium Corporation of America processed uranium and dumped the waste material, still radioactive, into the river. The Santa Rita neighborhood was directly across the river from this operation. These communities along the river were on the front lines of these toxins and carcinogens. A decade before these neighborhoods were dismantled, a public health doctor named George Moore sounded the alarm.
He came to La Plata County in 1955 with his young family to work for the San Juan Basin Health Department. His team analyzed the mounds of radioactive tailings along the Animas River.
Eventually, Moore’s team tested all the way downriver to Farmington, New Mexico, and found extremely high levels of radiation in the fish and algae in the Animas. These studies paid no attention to the humans living right across from the mill or the workers.
“One of the things that's been really interesting in my own research is seeing how, in particular after some of the nuclear testing, animals in particular were studied in ways that people were not studied,” said Myriah Gomez, the author of Nuclear Nuevo Mexico, a book about how New Mexicans were impacted by the nuclear industrial complex. She’s also the director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
She says people were not paid close attention to in terms of the short-term and long-term effects of exposure to radiation.
“And when you pay close attention to who these communities are and what types of people comprise these communities, it lays a really clear argument for environmental racism,” said Gomez. “Because these communities are often predominantly communities of color, whether they're indigenous communities or, especially in southern Colorado, northern New Mexico, Hispanic communities.”
Gomez says people living in Durango during the midcentury were directly impacted by the nuclear industrial complex during the Cold War. That included tests in Nevada and New Mexico, uranium mining in the Four Corners, and the uranium mill in their backyard. People like Rosalie and her family, who lived along the Animas River, were on the front lines of this region’s nuclear legacy.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act is a federal law that provides a one-time, lump-sum payment for individuals who developed certain cancers that were linked to nuclear weapons testing and uranium industry work. But this funding has limits, and it doesn't cover people who lived near sites linked to this legacy, like the Manzanares family.
Today these old neighborhoods are parks, pickleball courts, and green spaces. There’s a white water park for river enthusiasts where radioactive waste was once dumped directly into the river. And there's a dog park where towers of waste once sat for decades, blowing in the wind.
In the 1980s, the federal government cleaned up the areas along the river, and trucked all the nuclear waste to a holding facility above town.
“It's a difficult situation because there is an amnesia around uranium mining in Durango,” Gomez said. “Not a lot of people know the history of uranium mining in Durango and in Colorado. I think that those are the types of historical legacies that we really need to be examining closely in this day and age.”
President Trump is fast-tracking uranium mining in the region, and Gomez says we can’t forget what happened to these communities in the Southwest.
“Fight for the justice of what happened, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago, and prevent new uranium mines from opening in our communities”, said Gomez
Today the Manzanares family lives in California. It’s unclear whether Rosalie and other former residents of La Plata and Chihuahua are eligible for federal compensation. But she continues to advocate for herself, her family, and other families connected to these neighborhoods.