When Evanston resident Suzanne Aceron Badillo, who is Filipino American, saw a story in the Evanston RoundTable about the city’s first Filipino residents, she immediately sent it to her entire family.
She was excited to see the story in a mainstream newspaper, she said.
“That we were represented in an article, and shown the importance of our contributions in this community, was really interesting to see,” Badillo said. “It went beyond who my immediate circle of family and community were that I knew of, but it was long standing, that there was a long-standing history that started way before.”
The story was one of two RoundTable articles about Evanston’s early Filipino immigrants published this past summer — the latest edition of the Evanston Asian, South Asian and Pacific Islander Americans’ Placemaking Project.
The Placemaking Project started in 2022 when Evanston ASPA founder Melissa Raman Molitor learned there was no documented history of the city’s Asian American community in the libraries or the Evanston History Center.
Molitor began researching Asian American history after Illinois passed the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act in 2021, she said. The TEAACH Act requires Asian American history to be taught in all elementary and high schools. Molitor said the search was part of Evanston ASPA’s efforts to support teachers by connecting them with curriculum and resources.
“I really wanted to find ways for the students who were learning about Asian American history and the Asian American experience to be able to connect it personally, to their home, to their city,” Molitor said.
Collecting oral histories was an effort to “preserve stories before they become lost,” she added. In addition, she also realized it was important to document the organization’s current work and the stories of Asian Americans living in the city today, Molitor said.
In 2022, the Placemaking Project also published a three-part series about the first Chinese immigrant to Evanston, Wong Aloy.
“We get to tell a very particular local story, but we’re also illuminating the larger national story, which is really exciting,” Jenny Thompson, a historian working on the project, said.
Thompson said the research for the articles involved combing through census records, immigration documents and newspaper articles.
The project represents an investment in the future, she said.
“After we’re done or gone, it still exists,” Thompson said. “It takes so much time, but we have to make up for this lost time of neglect.”
The Placemaking Project has also partnered with a few Northwestern classes, specifically in the journalism and Asian American studies departments, Molitor said. Students had the opportunity to do interviews and collect the stories of various community members, she added.
According to Molitor, the Placemaking Project aims to build multimedia and physical archives that people can visit and use in research.
“We’re trying to build collective visibility and collective power by reclaiming who’s telling our story and who’s considered part of the story,” Molitor said. “In this city, Asian Americans have historically been left out of public memory and civic planning, and this work asserts our visibility. It challenges our exclusion and it expands who is seen as a stakeholder in our city’s future.”
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