The Subjects that Tents Make: The Architecture of Early Pentecostal Missions, Mexican Circuses, and Detention Camps in the US/Mexico Borderlands

This paper examines three kinds of tents and tented events that have been erected and coordinated in the US/Mexico borderlands, particularly Texas. The first two, early Pentecostal missionary meetings designed to convert Mexican people, and semi-local, small Mexican circuses, or *carpas,* coincided in the nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties. The third, tented migrant detention camps run by the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, especially those used to detain minors seperated from their caregivers, exploded across the borderlands and the national consciousness almost exactly one hundred years after the heyday of missionary tents and *carpas.* The paper details the similarities of the material infrastructure of the tent at all three sites, noting how the tent form offers a set of affordances and connotations that enable and constrain three distinct subject-making enterprises.