UNDOC+ Puerto Rico
Across generations, undoc+ migrants, refugees, and exilees have carried worlds with them.
This gathering is an invitation to pause from the urgency of survival and return to community.
To listen deeply.
To remember our ancestral knowledge.
To grieve loss.
To celebrate what has endured.
We understand healing as both personal and collective.
We understand liberation as something we practice together.
We have crossed borders, survived displacement, translated for our families, built homes in unfamiliar places, and created community in the midst of uncertainty. We have learned how to endure systems designed to make us disappear. We have also learned how to dream beyond them.
UNDOC+Collective invites undoc+ (formerly or currently undocumented) artists, curators, arts administrators, arts scholars, and cultural bearers to join us for a four-day gathering and retreat in Puerto Rico in Fall 2026 (tentatively mid-late Oct 2026).
To imagine what becomes possible when we gather not around scarcity, productivity, or crisis, but around care, kinship, creativity, and collective liberation grounded in our ancestral knowledge.
For four days, we will come together to cultivate practices of healing justice, mutual care, artistic expression, political imagination, and community-building. We will create space for rest and reflection while also tending to the futures we are building together.
Because healing is not separate from liberation.
Because imagination is a political practice.
Because our communities deserve spaces where we can be held, nourished, and transformed
❋ What We Will Practice Together
This gathering is not a conference.
It is not a networking event.
It is not a workshop.
It is a living practice of being together.
It is togetherness as resistance
❋ Participants will engage in
Collective care-based practices
Storytelling and memory work
Land- and place-based learning
Political artistic dialogue
Future-building and visionary practice
Intergenerational relationship-building
❋ Who we welcome
❋ Accessibility, Funding, and Care
❋ Our Invitation
We welcome applications from people working in the contemporary arts ecosystem whose lives are shaped by migration, displacement, and border-crossing experiences, including artists, curators, arts administrators, arts scholars, and cultural bearers, undoc+ individuals (formerly or currently undocumented), indigenous migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. No formal credentials are required. We are not seeking perfection, expertise, or professional accomplishments; we are seeking people who are committed to community, kinship, curiosity, and collective growth.
We especially encourage applications from undoc+ indigenous migrants, black migrants, queer, trans, and gender-expansive community members, disabled and chronically ill people, working-class communities, elders, and intergenerational practitioners, as well as emerging artists and organizers
We are committed to creating a gathering that is accessible, inclusive, and rooted in collective care.
Because our goal is to bring together as many community members as possible, we ask participants who are affiliated with universities, museums, cultural institutions, or other organizations to first explore available professional development, research, travel, or institutional support funds. By leveraging institutional resources when available, we can direct limited retreat funds toward participants who may not otherwise have access to financial support.
Selected participants will receive lodging, meals, and full participation in retreat programming. Limited travel assistance will be available and awarded based on demonstrated need and available funding. We recognize that access looks different for everyone. Accessibility accommodations will be provided whenever possible.
We are living through a time of profound uncertainty and possibility. Around us, systems of extraction, exclusion, and violence continue to shape everyday life. Yet our communities continue to create, nurture, organize, care, resist, and dream. This gathering begins from a simple belief: That another world is not only possible. It is already being practiced in the ways we care for one another. It lives in our stories. It lives in our creativity. It lives in our relationships. It lives in our ability to imagine futures beyond borders, beyond disposability, and beyond survival alone.
We invite you to join us. Come rest. Come remember. Come dream. Come build what comes next—together.
Why Puerto Rico?
Puerto Rico is a place shaped by migration, colonialism, resistance, survival, and profound cultural creativity.
As an archipelago carrying complex histories of displacement, sovereignty, diaspora, and self-determination, Puerto Rico offers fertile ground for conversations about belonging, movement, memory, and collective futures.
Application Material
A Personal Reflection
500–750 words • Due July 20, 2026
Answering the following
What motivates you to want to join this gathering?
How are you part of the UNDOC+ Community?
What experiences have shaped your relationship to migration, displacement, belonging, and community?
What questions, dreams, or (im)possibilities are you currently thinking through?
What do you hope to receive?
What contributions do you envision sharing in this gathering?
A Blade of Grass
This gathering is made possible through the support of A Blade of Grass and the 2026 In Fellowship cohort.
UNDOC+Collective is honored to be among the organizations selected for the 2026 fellowship, which supports artist-led projects that use gathering as a strategy for movement-building, community care, resource-sharing, and social transformation.
This retreat is part of our commitment to creating spaces where the undoc+ community cultivates the conditions necessary for collective flourishing.