“I was and still am not a subordinate”: Racial Ambiguities, Politicized Invisibilities, and Locating Filipina American Identity in Chicago

Drawing from the oral histories and personal archives of Estrella Alamar (a former leading actor in the preservation and promotion of Filipino American history in Chicago), I showcase how she subverted assumptions about Asian American women’s (a)political and subservient identities to navigate white supremacist spaces and gain a deeper understanding of her own political identity as a Filipina American woman. Reframing Estrella’s self-described invisibility during the 1960s Civil Rights Era and integration movement as a politicized invisibility makes way for new representations of: (1) How Filipino/Filipino Americans navigated ambiguous racial positioning in twentieth-century Chicago in ways that both upheld and challenged racial hierarchies; (2) the quotidian yet deeply transformative ways that Asian American women engage in anti-racist political movement; and (3) the legacy of Chicago’s Filipino American community leaders who worked across and against racial lines. In doing so, I argue that Estrella’s memories of quietly combatting anti-Blackness in her classrooms, Catholic encounter groups, and interpersonal relationships during the 1960s and 1970s unveils the ‘smaller’ yet impactful ways one can assert a political identity and combat social injustice outside of mainstream activist communities, even if such efforts are rendered invisible by those very same groups.