California Museum exhibit contrasts US labor

A new exhibition at the California Museum in California places historical photographs of Mexican labor recruitment and mass deportation side by side. Titled Help Wanted / Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation, the show centers on coerced removals in the 1930s and a 1954 campaign, according to the museum's advisory council.

The exhibition spans roughly twenty years of imagery with two distinct purposes. One set of photographs was created to document a workforce the United States actively recruited. Another set records the mass removal of that same population.

Recruitment-era imagery

Images from the recruitment era depict the lives of Mexican workers in the mid-20th century. One 1930s photo shows a man leaning against a car in a bare field, cradling a sleeping infant, with a makeshift shack behind him. Another captures a young cotton picker looking directly at the camera, a large canvas sack over her shoulder. Other frames show a boy carrying water in a beet field and a group of seven men posing together at the end of a shift.

During the labor shortages of the Second World War, new opportunities opened. A photograph shows two women in overalls walking between the wheels of a steam locomotive, lanterns in hand, performing railroad maintenance work.

The record of removal

Other photographs change the register entirely. One image shows a crowd of men pressing toward an open train door in desert country, with hands reaching down to pull others aboard. An attached label identifies it as men boarding a train to Mexico.

Further images document processing. One shows a line of men filing through an arched colonnade, each rolling up a sleeve for a vaccination. Another depicts dozens of men stripped to the waist inside a wooden building, holding numbered slips of paper as they wait.

Some pictures are unambiguous. 1954 photographs show a chain-link and barbed-wire compound in El Centro, California, crowded with detained men. Another street scene shows men lined up with suitcases beside a waiting bus, under police watch.

The museum's advisory council, which includes labor leader Dolores Huerta and several historians of Mexican-American labor, frames this history as a long-running pattern. They describe a cycle of recruitment in times of need and expulsion in times of political convenience. The council argues this pattern has repeated across a century and remains recognizable in immigration enforcement today.

The exhibition places these contrasting images uncomfortably together in the same rooms. It highlights the visual record of a revolving door policy, using photography to document both the need for labor and the reality of deportation.