A new exhibit at the California Museum in downtown Sacramento sets grainy 1950s newsreels of federal roundups next to video testimony from people immigration agents detained just last year — a deliberate argument that the machinery of mass deportation never stopped, it just kept revolving.

"Help Wanted/Leave Now: 'Operation Wetback' & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation" opened Aug. 13 and runs through January before touring nationally. It documents the Eisenhower-era campaign — named after a slur — that expelled roughly 1 million people, and holds it up against President Trump's current crackdown. For Bay Area readers, the show works less as a history lesson than as a mirror: the enforcement wave it references is unfolding right now in Gilroy, at SFO, and across the more than 20,000 local ICE ankle monitors The Dissent has documented this summer.

The show started with a stray thought. Pablo Espinoza — a longtime TV journalist, now a trustee on the museum's board — was touring an exhibit on the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans with his son when it struck him that the same room could carry a parallel story about the largest deportation drive in U.S. history. He has spent his career chronicling Latino life in California, and, as CalMatters reported (external source, opens in a new tab), figured he'd have been a plausible target in the 1954-55 raids himself. "We look the part," he said.

Getting the board to agree took the better part of a decade. Early on, Espinoza told the public radio station CapRadio, trustees dismissed the premise as history that couldn't repeat — they saw the exhibit's worth, he said, but not its urgency.

The exhibit is built around one image: a revolving door. Mexican laborers were recruited to prop up American industry through the wartime Bracero Program, then pushed out by the hundreds of thousands once the economy cooled and the politics turned. Museum curator Sean Manwaring, in remarks to CapRadio, used a blunt figure to convey how little that labor was valued — a bracero maimed on the job might be paid roughly $25 for a lost finger. Dolores Huerta, the civil rights organizer who advised the exhibit and cut her own teeth aiding braceros, described a federal subsidy that paid growers a flat daily sum per worker regardless of whether the men were housed or fed. Fortunes, she told the same station, were built "off the bodies of the braceros."

The exhibit's force comes from its refusal to keep any of this in the past tense. Video testimony from Victor Ochoa — a San Diego muralist who was deported to Mexico at 7 despite being a U.S.-born citizen — anchors the 1950s section. Federal agents in overcoats gave his family three days to leave on their own; his mother, he told CalMatters (external source, opens in a new tab), was left shaking and in tears. Ochoa's assessment of the present is shorter still: "It's meaner now."

Fortunes, she told the same station, were built "off the bodies of the braceros."

Paired with him is Vilma Palacios, 23, whom ICE picked up in June 2025, about a week before she was to start a nursing job and fresh off a Louisiana State University degree. Six months in detention ended with her accepting removal to Honduras, where the only person she knew was her grandmother. She had come to the U.S. at age 6. "I had built this whole life," she told CapRadio. She has since found nursing work abroad and can't cross back into the U.S. to stand in front of her own portrait on the wall.

The curators don't hide the throughline, and the news keeps validating it. As CalMatters documented (external source, opens in a new tab), text messages and audio surfaced last month capturing present-day agents deploying the same epithet — the one the Eisenhower administration made the official name of its program — during sweeps in Los Angeles.

Seen from the Bay Area, the exhibit plays like footnotes to the local feed. In the past month alone, a "Never Again" coalition has battled a proposed ICE facility near Gilroy, a San Francisco immigration court reopened bond hearings for detainees held across California, and data surfaced showing San Francisco leading the nation in ICE ankle monitors — 20,804 people, most never convicted of anything. The revolving door Espinoza spent ten years documenting is, for thousands of Bay Area households, turning in real time.

The design leans toward hope rather than despair — Espinoza's stated aim is to move visitors without flattening them. Aimed largely at kids, it's bilingual and tactile: bus seats to sit in, field dirt to touch. The run at the California Museum ends in January, and then it hits the road.