Explore This Section
Hyperallergic: 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.
Isa Farfan, Hyperallergic
July 31, 2026
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.
Read the full article on Hyperallergic.
Cover Image: Undocumented immigrants board bus for deportation to Mexico in Los Angeles, California, in 1949. (photo Larry Sharkey/Los Angeles Times Archive/UCLA Special Collections)