El Paso Matters – GALLERY: Scenes from ChangeMakers 2026 — art, performance, community

A standing ovation caught Rosa Ramirez Guerrero by surprise.

The 91-year-old educator and folklórico instructor — a key figure in El Paso’s cultural scene — placed her hand over her heart then blew a kiss to her peers and supporters as they rose to their feet during last week’s ChangeMakers event.

“It was lovely,” Guerrero said afterward about the standing ovation.

Being honored for her decades of work at the Mexican American Cultural Center — which opened just a year ago — felt like a full-circle moment.

“How lovely to get that here in this center, too. I didn’t expect that,” she said.

Guerrero was one of 29 honorees in this year’s ChangeMakers, a Women’s History Month event put on by El Paso Matters and Progress 321. This year’s event, hosted March 26 at the MACC, honored Borderland Women in the Arts – celebrating those who shape the region’s cultural and artistic landscape through visual and performing arts. About 250 people attended the event, which featured exhibits, live performances, film screenings and an art mercado.

Guest speaker Amanda Ekery, a native El Pasoan instrumentalist, vocalist and composer who was recently nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Album Notes category, performed a medley of her original songs from her album, “Árabe.” The album, she said, celebrates the shared Mexican and Syrian history and culture in El Paso. 

Ekery said she spent five years researching for the album.

“And during this process, I really fell in love with El Paso in a different way,” she said, adding that she worked with the archives at the University of Texas at El Paso Library, the El Paso Museum of History and interviewed different people. 

“Art really is everywhere in the Borderland. It’s in the hand-painted graphics on Alameda, the DIY punk show posters, the design of the spaces you inhabit, the production of our local car commercials,” she said. “It’s on the dance floor at your wedding, the way your food has been prepared and shared, and it’s in the music that scores every memory of your life.”

Ekery talked about using art as a tool to “make sense of the world, to process feelings and conflict, to use art as a tool to organize and implement change” and how artificial intelligence risks “removing all the social, emotional and especially cognitive benefits art can give us.”

MEET THE HONOREES: Women in the Arts take center stage at this year’s ChangeMakers event

Event sponsors included Franklin Mountain Investments, El Paso Community Foundation, University Medical Center of El Paso, Hunt Companies, Texas Tech Health University Center of El Paso, Creative Kids, Alamo Auto Supply, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, the Hospitals of Providence, HUB International, Strategic Wealth, La Semilla, El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department, Donor Charm. Evolve7 and j&k.

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