James Montoya

Albuquerque, NM

We do a little bit of everything. We have a community garden, plus we fight against uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping because New Mexico's been treated as like the nation's kind of waste dump.  Like right now there's a company called Holtec. What their plan is to take everybody's nuclear waste from the factories here on the coastal cities to New Mexico to be stored there for however many thousands of years it takes till it's not radioactive anymore.  So we already have the only site like that right now, which is called *WIPP, that had a leak like I think it was a year and a half, two years ago. It got shut down because there was a leak in the, in the containment pods. And so when they say it's safe, I mean I don't really buy it and plus they want to ship it by rail through all of these other states to get it to New Mexico.  I mean everybody is going to be a risk that whole way through. So stuff like that we really try to fight against and that's why being part of the poor people's campaign to kind of encompasses all of that.

*WIPP stands for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. New Mexico's site is the world's third deep geological repository for radioactive waste.

I kid with my mom that she's the best tortilla maker ever because they are pretty bomb tortillas.  In high school my house is like the house to go to, to like get good food.  Yeah. Because they would always have leftovers and stuff.  My parents. So, you know, for lunch or lunch break we'd go to my house because everyone's like, oh, wouldn't got leftovers today.  And did she pass down her tortilla making skills?  I mean, I know how to do it and I can make a cheap imitation, but it's not, it's not the same.  It's edible and everything. It's just hers come out perfectly round and mine come out like shaped like weird continents and yeah, not as fluffy or as good as hers.  I don't know.  She's got the magic touch when it comes to rolling them out.  They're like, they're not too thick, but they're not too thin.  Just thinking about them now I’m getting hungry (laughs).  That’s so good.  Right?