2025 Imagining America National Gathering
Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want

Las Cruces, New Mexico | New Mexico State University
Friday, October 3 – Sunday, October 5, 2025

Featured Image: Destino Manifesto by Citlali Delgado, Visual Artist for the IA 2025 National Gathering

In partnership with New Mexico State University and a local Steering Committee, Imagining America (IA) invites participants to gather in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the 2025 IA National Gathering. Marking the 25th anniversary of Imagining America, this gathering celebrates and conjures passages: of time, texts, pathways, and portals that IA has created for public and engaged scholars in the past, present, and imaginable future; and of the life-sustaining ecological, physical, intellectual, and spiritual passages that artists, organizers, and scholars provide as a way forward in the turbulent currents of our time.

The 2025 IA National Gathering invites us to consider how to provide passage for one another and all beings towards a more just, liberatory, and caring future. In ecological terms, to provide passage is to create infrastructure for traveling upstream or through dangerous river crossings towards safety, helping to ensure long-term community resilience. In times of uncertainty and repression, creative and courageous people have worked collectively, at great risk, to provide passage at dangerous crossings towards havens of safety and belonging.

We take inspiration from the Payhla mur / Bay la mur / Río Bravo / Rio Grande** watershed, which flows from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado through New Mexico and along the Texas-Mexico border, serving as a lifeline for millions. This riverine passage connects and separates the vast and vibrant Paso del Norte region (a geographic cultural area that includes the cities of Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez). The region forms the binational Borderplex through which thousands of people move daily north to support their families and communities, generating billions of dollars from their labor, and south to visit loved ones and enjoy the interior of Mexico. The Paso del Norte is a permeable borderland whose meaning is made and remade daily by the transits and passages of people and animals.

The 2025 IA National Gathering invites participants to reflect on the ways we provide passage for one another, create havens for safety, and practice connective ways of being together that fortify us for the journey ahead. We especially welcome attention to how art making, creative culture, performance, storytelling, and testimonios provide passage for mutual understanding and collective liberation and make it possible to move towards the seemingly impossible.

We also invite you to reflect on the tensions between safe passage and forced passage, passages of birth and death, and to consider what we must disavow and leave behind so that we do not reproduce troubled pasts and presents. The work of providing passage is not easy and none of it is guaranteed – havens sometimes only provide temporary refuge, belonging is often determined by othering, movements seldom see the full realization of the worlds they helped bring into being. Yet, a proliferation of creative, caring passages is necessary in envisioning and making a different world. As Andrea Ritchie writes, “We need to seek out as many portals as we can find into futures we cannot currently imagine and practice them every day” (2023). In a time where U.S. culture is marked by an isolationist fear of others, consumerist individualism, and social estrangement, we must engage in what Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba call the “ongoing work of charting and experiencing reality together and sharing our joy and grief over the wonders and tragedies of our times” (2023).

The 2025 IA National Gathering will explore questions related to the theme of providing passage, uplift work in the borderlands of Las Cruces and the Paso del Norte, and celebrate Imagining America’s 25th anniversary. An IA-curated track will showcase timely work from the IA network, and offer a participatory deliberative space for conference participants to engage in creative dialogue, reflection, strategy, and cultural production surrounding shared concerns and hopes for surviving, thriving, resisting, and building in these times.

* The name of the big river is Payhla mur in the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Bay la mur in the Tortugas Pueblo, Río Bravo in the Spanish language in Mexico, and Rio Grande in the English language in the United States.

In your proposal submission, we invite you to consider: 

  • What are the practices and actions of providing passage that offer protection, healing, and collectivity?
  • How do artists, organizers, students, and academic and community-based scholars create a lifeline for people and the planet in times of uncertainty and repression?
  • How do we create (physical, spiritual, community, educational, etc.) infrastructure to help beings travel (literally and metaphorically) upstream or through dangerous river crossings to safety and ensure long-term community resilience?
  • What are the realities of communities in the Paso del Norte and other borderlands? How might their stories help to upend assumptions about relations across borders?
  • How might we think broadly and intersectionally about borders – across scales, space, relations – to consider all the ways we give and take passage as individuals, as members of families, institutions, states, and nations?
  • How does cultural organizing, public and community engaged scholarship provide passage for people, ideas, and research?
  • How does history provide examples of providing passage that allow us to understand the present moment more fully?
  • Which textual or artistic passages have inspired deeper understanding of the past, critical analysis of the present, and inspiration towards an imaginable future?
  • How can the university be a haven, for a moment in time and space, to create shared belonging? Or can it?
  • What will it take for us to build the world we want to survive and even thrive in these times?

Preparing Your Proposal

When preparing your proposal, the 2025 IA National Gathering organizers invite you to propose an interactive session in one of the following formats:

Share a Presentation About Your Research, Practice, or Artistic Work (5-15 minutes)

1. Lightning Talk, 5 minutes. A single speaker will share current or past work, creative outputs, media, artistic practice, or community projects. Six lightning talks are scheduled in each 60-minute session; each speaker has five minutes to present, and the opportunity to integrate shared concepts of their talks into the following group discussion. Speakers may choose to use a visual guide (i.e. poster, powerpoint presentation, video or audio clip), but it is not required.

2. Projects & Practices Presentation, 15 minutes. Groups or individuals will share compelling outcomes, lessons learned, methods, or collective change that emerged from community-based projects centering the arts, performance, design, cultural organizing, and humanities practices. When submitting your proposal, you must pre-select two themes that best apply: 1) creative community arts, 2) public engaged scholarship, 3) cultural organizing, 4) institutional culture change, 5) practices of providing passage, 6) borderlands. In each session organized by theme, three presenting groups will give 15-minute presentations with 15 minutes remaining for shared discussion.

Lead an Interactive Discussion, Workshop, or Media/Performance Presentation (60 minutes)

3. Participatory Workshop, 60 minutes. Facilitators set an agenda and organize participant activities. The session can focus on specific skill development, artistic or creative practice, participatory performance and movement, guided collective activity, or facilitate interactive dialogue around a pressing issue or action. Workshops must be highly interactive, collaborative, and provide opportunities for group co-creation.

4. Performance or Media Screening, 60 minutes. Share a performance or media screening related to the IA National Gathering thematic. These sessions are scheduled in an auditorium venue and presenters will have access to a projector, screen, and microphone set up. Note: organizers do not have the capacity to provide technical production support for performance or offer rehearsal space in advance.

Do Something Different! (ongoing)

5. Creative Works, ongoing. We welcome your creative, alternative proposals for visual and/or material work, or collective art-making activities that are ongoing (not limited to a single session). Creative works will be set up in the IA registration hub and may include self-directed instructions for participants, or be staffed. If selected for inclusion in the IA National Gathering, IA staff will reach out for specific set up needs. Examples may include a table-top exhibit of original art, or a listening station with headphones, or directions for a game or scavenger hunt, or instructions and materials for participants to make a zine or a quilt!

How to Submit Your Proposal

The submission deadline is Monday, June 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM PT.

Please submit your proposal via this form, or download the form as a printable PDF.

Each proposal requires the following information:

1. Session Organizer(s) Information
2. Session Format
3. Session Title
4. Session Description (350 words)
5. Session Contribution to IA and the IA National Gathering Theme (200 words)

If your proposal format is a Participatory Workshop, you will also need to submit:

6. Session Goals (200 words)

Questions?

Learn more about submitting a proposal by attending a virtual information session:

Email us at gathering@imaginingamerica.org or call (530) 297-4640.

***

About the Artist

Citlali Delgado is a visual artist from El Paso, Texas with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New Mexico State University. Based in the borderlands, her paintings function to understand how she and her community can live with, against, and past the border. As a Chicana, she embodies pro-migrant and immigrant values through representation of Latino and feminist multiplicity to ultimately encourage critical resistance and liberation. She has attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency program and has work in the Eastern New Mexico University and the New Mexico State University Museum permanent collections. She has shown at the El Paso Museum of Art Border Biennial, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez Bienal Fronteriza, and the Ecos del Sol exhibition at the Museum of the Big Bend.

About the Artwork

Destino Manifesto is a rendition of “American Progress,” or better known as the visual embodiment of “Manifest Destiny,” a painting that can be recognized by most people who attended public schools in the United States. To be from a border town, the reevaluation of promotion of westward expansion and disregard of people of color embedded in the education system is essential in the accountability of unrelatedness that is being lectured to Chicano children, for example, when events such as the Bath Riots are to be taught. The specific and recent surge (in 2023) of Latino migrant families leaving their motherlands, seeking refuge escaping conflict to go to a place that has been militarized to specifically keep them out has no other word to describe it except for inhumane. This surge has been called the migrant crisis when it might be more accurate to call it a humanitarian crisis. With that, though La Virgen de Guadalupe doesn’t represent all migrant cultures in belief, it does for many embody hope that is prominent in Mexico and Mexican American culture. I illustrated her hovering over the border wall, guiding the migrants of the humanitarian crisis to El Paso’s Sagrado Corazon church in the Segundo Barrio to replace the gentrifying angel flying over indigenous land.

Works Cited 

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023.

Andrea J. Ritchie, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and adrienne maree brown. Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2023.

By dreaming and building together in public, Imagining America creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures. The IA National Gathering is a convening of more than 500 public scholars, artists, designers, teachers, students, and cultural organizers who are addressing the most pressing issues of our time. Gatherings offer participants a three-day immersive experience in which to connect, dialogue, learn, and strategize on the ways in which the arts, humanities, and design are and may be leveraged locally, regionally, nationally, and across borders towards transformative action.