Latinas and Latinos at 1940s Hanford: Recruitment, Segregation and Belonging

Billie Carey and Victor Valdez at a Richland dance competition, October 1944. U.S. Department of Energy.

Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities

The Manhattan Project at Hanford, Washington, and the nearby Tri-Cities are known for producing plutonium for nuclear weapons in World War II and the Cold War. They also hold the stories of many communities shaped by race and ethnicity. In the 1940s the area resembled much of the South: segregation, discrimination and racism were built into the community — customs carried from the South to places like the Tri-Cities.

That history still shows. Richland, built for the project's White administrators, is seventy-five percent White today. Kennewick, a "sundown town" in the 1940s, is forty-four percent non-White. And Pasco, where Asian Americans, African Americans and Mexican Americans were once segregated, is home to nearly eighty percent of the area's people of color.

About 150 Latinas and Latinos

Spanish speakers, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans worked, played and made lives in the Tri-Cities in the 1940s. The roughly 150 Latinas and Latinos estimated to have come for the Manhattan Project show how race, ethnicity and gender shaped recruitment — and how discrimination could be contradictory and unstable. (The estimate draws on Texas recruitment records, Spanish-surnamed workers in personnel reports, and newspapers; official records of the time mostly used "Mexican," "Spanish American" and "Latin American.")

Recruiting in Texas

In March and April 1944, the War Manpower Commission's Region X office in Dallas tried to recruit Mexican Americans from Texas for Hanford — "bilingual non-manual personnel" — in El Paso, Brownsville, Laredo and San Antonio.

• The campaign: with the U.S. Employment Service and DuPont, it advertised in Spanish-language newspapers and on local radio. San Antonio's La Prensa listed jobs from day laborers and mechanics to telephone operators and engineers, open to both sexes — though essential farm workers need not apply. Recruiters also approached LULAC, businesses, churches and schools, and spoke to a high school assembly of about 500 students.
• The result: only about sixty Texas Mexican Americans (Tejanos) were hired and moved, and the campaign was dropped within weeks.

A DuPont report explained why: the project employed men only, with no family housing, while Tejano families migrated together and relied on the combined earnings of the whole family. Recruiters probably also carried assumptions from the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican men to work in the U.S. during the war. By providing only for single men — a patriarchal, White idea of the family — the government favored White settlement and kept non-White families from staying.

Where they lived

Latino workers lived in very different places. Some were deliberately segregated; others were accepted into White housing, recreation and workplaces.

• Top positions: Adolfo Linares, born in Puerto Rico, came from New York City as the Pile Project's fiscal director; his family lived in Richland, where he died in 1952. Ivan M. Garcia, an electrical engineer straight from Puerto Rico, worked for Hanford contractors into the 1970s, lived in Richland for many years, and in the early 1960s belonged to a Spanish club that helped Cuban refugees.
• Segregated: Colonel Franklin Matthias had opposed recruiting Mexicans because they were neither Black nor White and he was unsure how to segregate them. A 1945 project history called their housing "a potential racial problem" solved with "a separate camp"; Matthias's diary puts it in "Little Pasco," temporary housing fifteen miles east of Hanford, beside the railway and north of Pasco's City View Cemetery. General Leslie Groves and Matthias required "careful checks as to citizenship and loyalty" before hiring. Placed at the edge of Pasco, like Black and Asian residents, Tejanos were clearly not expected to stay.

"Little Pasco" temporary housing, 1943. U.S. Department of Energy.

Finding a place

Some did find belonging — usually by fitting into White spaces.

• Dancing: Private Victor F. Valdez and his partner Billie Carey won Richland's jitterbug contest, pictured in the Sage Sentinel receiving their award with the NAS Jive Bombers, a traveling Black jazz orchestra, behind them.
• Boxing: Hanford's boxing club drew transportation worker Myles Martinez of Minneapolis and "Hanford's own bantam battler" Abran "Abie" Chavez of New Mexico, whose hard-fought loss to Joey Dolan on November 20, 1944, packed the auditorium of Mess Hall 2.
• Society: Vera Martinez, who had moved from southern Colorado to work for General Electric's construction division, was crowned "Valentine Queen" at the third annual Beta Sigma Phi formal in 1950.

What these stories show

A lasting Spanish-speaking community came about twenty years later. But in the 1940s these workers show how the Tri-Cities' racial order was upheld — and unsettled. White family norms discouraged Tejano families from settling; Puerto Ricans in top jobs were welcomed in Richland; some Latinos faced segregation while others moved into White spaces. The contradictions needed to keep prejudice in place reveal how race and ethnicity were changing.

Sources

Based on Drew Gamboa, "Latinas/os of 1940s Hanford," Manhattan Project National Historical Park, National Park Service, drawing on DuPont and Manhattan District histories, Colonel Franklin Matthias's diary, the Sage Sentinel, the Tri-City Herald, La Prensa and Robert Bauman's "Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943–1950"; published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. A 1944 La Prensa job listing from the University of Texas at San Antonio library is not reproduced.