Tales of Uptown:

A comic Book Anthology

GLAS 300: GLOBAL ASIA IN CHICAGO | SPRING 2026

This collection of comics was produced by students in the course “GLAS 300: Global Asia in Chicago” in Spring 2026. The course explores the vibrant working-class histories and everyday stories of Uptown, its transnational and diasporic migrant narratives, and the communities’ urban resilience in the context of neoliberalism, Orientalism, and the legacies of U.S. imperialism and militarism. It seeks to unearth and recover the presence of Asian/Asian Americans in this neighborhood. This semester, the students worked with the oral histories of Vietnamese, Cambodian/Khmer, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Filipinx/a/o community members and represented an aspect of their stories in a comic book format. Each story represents a semester long process of engaging with Uptown’s history, learning from community members and organizers, conducting field visits in Uptown, and receiving guidance from artists like fledgling comics maker Isabel Garcia-Gonzales. Each story is merely a slice and a snapshot of an individual’s story - an invitation to learn more about each individual and Uptown as a port of entry and a home to so many im/migrants, including those from various parts of Asia.

About the anthology

by Amira Altamimi and Anne Nguyễn

Throughout the Spring 2026 course Global Asia in Chicago, we, as students, spent time closely working with and examining the various communities that have formed in Uptown, their relationships with each other, and the ongoing gentrification of the neighborhood. Our anthology focuses on the concept of community. What does it mean to have a community? What does it mean to lose a community? What does it mean to rebuild and find your way back in an unfamiliar environment? Each story presented in this anthology follows a different narrator with a distinct relationship to community, especially as it pertains to Uptown, and how that relationship has shaped not only our narrators’s lives, but also the community they have built for themselves.

Community does not exist without the individual, and every individual has a story worth telling. In a neighborhood as diverse and rich in history as Uptown, this means the unique stories of many individuals are intertwined in obvious or unseen ways. From the rolling waves of refugees who resettled within the area, to the lasting memories of the Multi-Cultural Youth Project comes a collection of stories inspired by lives that paint Uptown’s narrative in new colors. These stories came from a series of recorded oral histories of community members, collected by previous GLAS 300 student scholars and Prof. Guevarra from 2017 to 2025. It is, and always will be, important to celebrate each other’s stories as displacement and gentrification threaten to erase what once was. Sometimes, the simple act of remembering can be the strongest defense.

The Class

About the Cover Art by Isabelle F. Dizon: “Tales of Uptown" is a reflection of how a “yarn" is another term for a long conversation, or an extensive ramble. At the center is a ball of yarn, a metaphor for Uptown, and a centerpoint from which multiple strings are spread out in different directions. Every string represents an individual depicted in a story, whose origin stories stem from Uptown and branch out into their own lives. The extra string represents our class' creation of this anthology, in which we have stepped into Uptown and paved our own reflections of its histories, taking the form of embroidered typography. IG: @issafdizon

Layout by Prof. Anna Guevarra and Avni Gupta