Stout Jackson & The Carpa Theaters

Jackson's tents arrived when the stage had thinned out. Spanish-language touring companies had worked South Texas since the early 1900s, from Laredo to the Valley and, by 1926, to Hebbronville, Benavides and San Diego. When the Depression came in the early 1930s, the resident stock companies were among the first casualties. The Handbook of Texas says Spanish-language vaudeville, motion pictures imported from Mexico and local Spanish-language radio then took their place. A tent that paired Mexican films with live acts fitted that moment.

What the plaque says

Stout Jackson & The Carpa Theaters Thomas Jefferson Jackson was born in 1890 in North Texas to a rancher and Baptist minister and his wife. Raised to value physical labor and good health, Jackson grew up with enough physical strength to be a professional strongman at age 17. He took his act on the road, performing in Texas, Oklahoma, Central and South America. As silent films gained popularity, "Stout" Jackson set them up in tents as sidelines to his act. Jackson retired from the strongman business in the 1930s. He noticed a dearth of Spanish-language entertainment in South Texas despite the high population of Tejanos and other Latinos in the area. In 1935 "Stout" Jackson and his wife Beatrice moved to Robstown and opened the Teatros Carpas, tent theaters, to immediate community acclaim. Jackson contracted with a Spanish-language film distributor and initially set up tents and projectors all over the region, but soon focused on his theaters in Robstown, Kingsville, Falfurrias and Alice. Tejano workers and their families flocked to the theaters. Jackson showcased prominent Mexican and other Spanish-language entertainers, who would appear at the "Carpas" in conjunction with screenings of their films. He also arranged for variety acts and occasionally Anglo performers would appear. After World War II, Jackson began to build permanent homes for his theaters. Based on tubular steel and concrete, his designs were structurally sound and resisted weather, vandalism and even fire. Jackson also designed drive-in movie screens, fireproof housing and bomb shelters. The last Teatro Carpa closed in 1963, its time run out as legal racial segregation came to an end. "Stout" Jackson died in an Austin nursing home in 1976. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 15 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 17 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 17 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Mirador de la Flor — 17 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• George H. Paul Building Site — 0.6 mi
• Calallen — 6.3 mi
• Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium — 6.4 mi
• Nuecestown Cemetery — 6.5 mi