An exhibition created with Dolores Huerta traces U.S. deportation history

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Set us as preferred Nearly six months after Dolores Huerta went public with sexual abuse allegations against former labor leader Cesar Chavez, with whom she co-founded United Farmworkers, the 96-year-old activist said she’s prioritized involving herself in labor and women’s rights.Part of that work is now on view at the California Museum in Sacramento in an exhibition called “Help Wanted/Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ and the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation,” which examines decades of the federal government’s deportation campaigns against Mexican immigrants even while it recruited millions of these farmworkers and rail workers to fill labor shortages during and after World War II.The show opened last week and runs through Jan.10 in Sacramento, with plans then to travel to other institutions.

It was developed with guidance from an advisory board that included Huerta, academics and other experts on immigration history.“There are a lot of similarities with what’s going on now with what happened,” Huerta said in a recent Zoom interview.Entertainment & Arts At 86, Dolores Huerta has been working as a civil rights activist for over six decades.

One such story is that of muralist Victor Ochoa, who was just 7 years old in 1955, when two men wearing “Gestapo-looking” uniforms arrived at his East Los Angeles family home.The day before, he’d attended the opening of Disneyland.

Hours later, Ochoa watched as a firearm-bearing agent told his mother that she had three days to move her family to Mexico.“I was frightened about it,” Ochoa, now 78, who was born in Los Angeles and spoke no Spanish at the time, said in an interview.Heeding the stranger’s orders, Ochoa’s family left for Tijuana in their trailer on the heels of then-President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” a mass deportation o...