By admin 
Standing inside the California Museum in Sacramento, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla stared at a video of himself being manhandled by cops and federal agents — with the same impunity with which brown-skinned people have been abused in California for generations.
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Padilla is the first Latino to represent California in the United States Senate. But on that 2025 day when the camera was rolling as he tried to question a Trump administration official, men with badges meted out the “wetback” treatment by wrestling Padilla to the ground — linking the senator with humble Mexican immigrants in a kinship of brutality.
“Wetback” is the century-old slur that describes Mexican nationals crossing the Rio Grande into the U.S. It’s been shortened to “wet” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who also call brown people “tonks,” which signifies the sound a baton or a flashlight makes when striking an immigrant in the head.
Padilla — the 53-year-old former California Secretary of State, president of the Los Angeles City Council, graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and son of Santos and Guadalupe Padilla of Mexico — was only supposed to spend 10 minutes or so at the museum to review a powerful new exhibit called “Help Wanted / Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ & The Revolving Door of Mass Deportation.”
Instead, he lingered for roughly 30 minutes last Tuesday.
“This is a reason I didn’t run for governor,” he told me when I saw him at the exhibit.
Yes, Padilla took many by surprise in November when he announced that he wouldn’t run for governor even though he would have become the prohibitive favorite if he had. Staying in the Senate to help achieve comprehensive immigration reform was, to my ears, the most specific reason Padilla has given for choosing Washington over Sacramento. This goal seems personal to him, a way for him and our government to address the exploitation of workers like those in the exhibit.
Depicting nearly a century of recruitment, mistreatment and deportation of Latino immigrants, mostly from Mexico, the exhibit is the brainchild of former Spanish-language journalist and Capitol staffer Pablo Espinoza.
Padilla was clearly moved by it. A simple walkthrough on his way to his next appointment — shaking a few hands, expressing a few platitudes — turned into something else entirely. Suddenly, the man whose birth name is Alejandro Padilla was delivered from the methodical path of self-discipline he’s traveled to the highest levels of political power in California.
Reforming America’s broken immigration system, Padilla has repeatedly said, is the best way to end the brutal cycle of recruiting cheap labor from Mexico and then deporting those workers and their families.
That revolving door of dependence on immigrant labor and political hostility directed at the laborers is at the heart of the exhibit in Sacramento.
More than once, Padilla stopped in his tracks at what he saw. There are heart-rending photos of Mexican workers recruited to the U.S. on the promise of good wages and fair treatment. There are the rusted tools the workers used, including the now-illegal short-handled hoe that once forced workers to tend California’s harvest fields while stooped over in virtual subservience. The Mexicans called the tool “El Brazo del Diablo.” The arm of the devil.
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Padilla saw images of workers in Mexico, stripped of their shirts as they were disinfected, sometimes with kerosene, before being allowed into the U.S. He was told how workers would have their pay docked if they suffered an injury, such as a severed finger. The senator sat on a bus seat that was a replica of the transports used to deport workers and, sometimes, their American-born children.
Sitting alone, Padilla saw haunting videos of the deported. There was an older woman who said, “What did I know of Mexico?” when she and her family were removed from their home a generation ago. There was a younger woman who said today’s deportation systems are designed as if the object was to make the deported “hysterical.” The symbolism of this particular senator absorbing these stories just a few feet from another video screen showing Padilla being subdued by cops and federal agents was impossible to miss: it’s all part of the same story.
More than 20 years ago, when he was on the Los Angeles City Council, Padilla said immigrant families would bring their children to see him as living proof that anything was possible in America. The parents would say, “We are telling our children to be just like you.”
“Don’t lay that on me. I’m human,” Padilla said when recalling his inner monologue during those moments.
The senator looked entirely human as he was overpowered in the video clip of his 2025 encounter with law enforcement. He was asked what he thought as he watched the clip again.
“I’m still processing it,” Padilla said, adding that the sight of a U.S. senator roughed up by cops was tough on some people he knows. It was a dark moment in President Donald Trump’s current deportation campaign, one that fits right in with the history of the deportations depicted in the exhibit.
I mentioned to Padilla that I thought I would cry when seeing the deportation exhibit but that I mostly felt anger. “We can feel both,” he told me.
Like Padilla, the people in the exhibit retained a sense of hope and a desire to build lives for themselves while contributing to the betterment of the United States. Their dignity and faith are the lasting memory of an exhibit that needs to be widely seen.
“We’re not going anywhere,“ Padilla said.
Padilla’s thinking has evolved a bit since those days when he’d meet those parents in the L.A. council chambers. He’s still “human,” but he’s embracing his role as a trailblazer.
He recalled a recent conversation he had with a senate colleague who assured him that he “loved” Mexican workers and had nothing against them. Padilla said he reminded his colleague that the children of Mexican immigrants can grow up one day to be anything, including a United States Senator.
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And, maybe, in time, a governor.