Erected Emptied Erased
Contributor
Best Before
In early 2025, the Mexican government inaugurated what it called a “temporary shelter” for migrants in Mexicali: a massive white tent erected at the FEX (Ferias, Eventos y Exposiciones) fairgrounds, capable of housing more than two thousand people. Within months, it was dismantled. Once a symbol of humanitarian readiness, it now survives only as a faint trace in a few press photographs—a structure built to disappear.
The tent was a typical logistical assembly—the kind used for fairs or emergency operations: a pitched-roof prefabricated structure of high-strength aluminum or steel covered with white PVC-coated fabric. Diffused light entered through the membrane, but there was no natural ventilation. The ground was covered with synthetic turf, and rows of bunk beds filled the interior. Its architectural ambition stopped at containment. It sheltered without inhabiting and housed without dwelling.
The FEX mega shelter perfectly illustrates the prescribed temporality of humanitarian design.1 Born out of urgency and celebrated as an efficient response to crisis, it soon became obsolete. Its life cycle was predetermined, designed to expire. In that sense, humanitarian architecture is not merely temporary; it is perishable. Its value peaks before it is inhabited, when it still belongs to the realm of promise. Once deployed, it begins to deteriorate physically, politically, and ethically.
As Andrew Herscher suggests, humanitarian architecture carries a “better-before” condition, where the gesture of care is undermined by its own ephemerality. The FEX tent embodies this contradiction. Designed for mobility and neutrality, it leaves no trace, no history, no accountability. Once dismantled, its components are stored or discarded, ready to reappear elsewhere and repeat the cycle of emergency and erasure.
This condition is not exceptional.2 Across Mexico, migration management unfolds through infrastructures that mimic detention centers tectonic yet lack permanence or oversight. The tent becomes a political device, deployed to relieve pressures and to display action without committing to continuity.
If architecture is a negotiation with permanence, humanitarian design rejects that pact. It erases itself before it can decay. Yet in doing so, it also erases memory. The FEX tent was not simply an object of care; it became an instrument of forgetting.
Every tent has its best-before date. What follows is not renewal but silence.
Sofia Aguirre. Dismount of FEX shelter in Mexicali, Mexico. August, 2025.
- Humanitarian design refers to the use of architectural and design practices to address conditions of crisis (e.g. natural disasters, displacement, or poverty) often under the banner of “doing good.” While it aims to provide urgent relief, critics have pointed out that it frequently reproduces precariousness and aestheticizes emergency. See Andrew Herscher, “Humanitarian Design and the Politics of Relief,” in Disaster-Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Stanford University Press, 2017). ↩︎
- As WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) reports, migrant shelters across Mexico, (whether state-run or improvised) frequently operate with precarious infrastructure, limited oversight, and rapid cycles of opening and closure, reflecting a broader pattern of impermanent migration management. See WOLA, “A Trail of Impunity,” Washington Office on Latin America, 2023. ↩︎