California Exhibition to Document One of the US’s Worst Deportation Campaigns
“Help Wanted / Leave Now” traces the infamous “Operation Wetback” implemented by Eisenhower in 1954 to expel undocumented Mexican workers.
Juan Garcia, history professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, grew up in South Texas in an established Mexican-American ranching family. When he was around six years old, his father abruptly abandoned his trade and relocated his nine children to Chicago.
The reasons his family left Texas were complicated, and the retired professor has since spent his career studying the political headwinds that punctuated the lives of his farmer father and his mother, who lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as they headed east.
Some of the fruits of Garcia's research and excerpts of his family story will be publicly displayed in a forthcoming exhibition at Sacramento's California Museum, entitled Help Wanted / Leave Now: "Operation Wetback" & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation.
Organized in collaboration with historians including Garcia and labor rights activist Dolores Huerta, the bilingual exhibition revolves around "Operation Wetback," one of the US's most notorious operations to deport Mexican immigrants. ("Wetback" was a derogatory term used to refer to undocumented immigrants who may have crossed into the US through the Rio Grande.) The exhibition will open on August 13 and run through January 10, 2027.
