In a bare, wind-scoured field in the 1930s, a man leans against the running board of an old car, a sleeping infant cradled against his chest. Behind him stands the family's home: a shack, cobbled together from scrap wood, cardboard and torn sacking, a single stovepipe jutting from the roof. A young girl watches from the doorway.
No caption is needed to explain what kind of life this is. It's the same visual world that Dorothea Lange and her Farm Security Administration colleagues were documenting up and down California at the time.
Except the families in these particular frames were Mexican, and many of them would soon be forced out of the country entirely – regardless of whether they held US citizenship.
Elsewhere in the same era, a young cotton picker looks straight into the lens, a canvas sack half her own height slung over one shoulder, already bulging with the day's work.
A boy stands alone in a freshly worked beet field, hoisting a battered metal water can above his head to carry to the other workers. A group of seven men poses together at the end of a shift, laughing, one holding up a fistful of harvested beets for the camera.
Two women in overalls and caps walk between the wheels of a steam locomotive, lanterns swinging from their hands, doing railroad maintenance work that had opened up to Mexican and Mexican-American women during the labor shortages of the Second World War.
These are recruitment-era pictures, made to document a workforce the country needed and, in some cases, had gone looking for.
Other pictures change the register entirely.
One frame shows a crowd of men, hats on, pressing toward the open door of a train carriage in open desert country, hands reaching down to pull each other up and in. The label attached to the photograph states plainly what it is: men boarding a train to Mexico.
Another shows a long line of men filing through an arched colonnade, one after another rolling up a sleeve so that a young woman can swab his arm before a vaccination. A third shows dozens of men stripped to the waist inside a wooden building, holding numbered slips of paper, waiting their turn in a queue that stretches out of frame.
Whether some of these images were made for entry processing or for deportation processing isn't obvious from the pictures alone.
Others, however, are unambiguously so: 1954 photographs of a chain-link and barbed-wire compound at El Centro, California, crowded with men held behind the fence, and a street scene of men lined up with their suitcases beside a waiting bus, police officers standing watch on the pavement.
Together, these images span roughly twenty years and two different purposes: one set made to record a labor force that the United States actively recruited, the other to record its mass removal.
The appropriately titled exhibition Help Wanted / Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation at the California Museum places them uncomfortably together, in the same rooms.
The show is centered on the coerced removals of the 1930s and the Eisenhower-era 1954 campaign, but the museum's advisory council, which includes the labor leader Dolores Huerta and several historians of Mexican-American labor, frames the story as older and longer-running still.
A pattern of recruitment in times of need, expulsion in times of political convenience. Repeated across a century and, they argue, still recognizable in immigration enforcement today.
