One Woman's Keychain-by-Keychain Mission to Preserve Chicago's 'Little Palestine'

In the southwest suburbs of Chicago, in an area unofficially and now semi-officially known as Little Palestine, Dorrah Alharbi has spent the past year collecting keepsakes that don't look like much on their own: a keychain covered in Disney princesses, a hand cross-stitched "God bless our home" sign, a silver pulse-powered watch, a 1921 driver's license issued in Palestine. Individually, they're clutter. Together, in Alharbi's telling, they're a history that has never been properly written down. Alharbi, an Iraqi American art historian and University of Illinois Chicago graduate, launched the Little Palestine Project last summer as an object-based oral history initiative. The premise is simple: sit with first-generation Arab immigrants, many of them elderly women, and ask what one item they carried with them when they left home. From that single object, a fuller story usually unspools. The project takes its name from the stretch of Bridgeview, Palos Hills and Orland Park that has become the largest concentration of Palestinian Americans in the country, alongside sizable Iraqi, Lebanese and Yemeni populations. Bridgeview formally adopted the "Little Palestine" designation with street signs and banners earlier this year, giving a long-informal neighborhood identity an official marker — but Alharbi's project is aimed at the human layer underneath the signage. Take the story behind one of the project's most striking artifacts: a Palestinian wedding thobe, heavy with tatreez embroidery referencing the city of Ramallah, that belongs to a woman named Fatima. As an 11-year-old during the 1967 Naksa, Fatima fled her hometown of Imwas — a village later razed — for Jordan and eventually Chicago. The dress, kept for decades, is now one of roughly 15 stories Alharbi has documented and posted to the project's Instagram account, alongside family photographs, immigration papers and embroidery passed through generations. Alharbi's own path to the project is personal. Her family immigrated from Iraq in the 1990s and settled first on Chicago's North Side before moving, like many Arab families, to the southwest suburbs — where she says she's one of relatively few Iraqi Americans in a heavily Palestinian community. That in-between position, she has said, is part of what drives her: paying homage to a neighborhood that shaped her without being the community's most obvious narrator. The project has drawn institutional recognition beyond a devoted Instagram following. Illinois Humanities named Alharbi among its 2026 grantee partners, funding the Little Palestine Project as an oral-history effort explicitly aimed at preserving Arab immigrant histories in the Chicago suburbs. That grant puts real institutional weight behind what started as an informal collecting habit — proof, Alharbi has argued, that Chicago's Arab and Palestinian diaspora deserves the same documentary infrastructure that other immigrant enclaves, from Chinatown to Little Village, have built over decades. Alharbi has said she sees the timing as urgent. With intensified global attention on Palestinians since 2023, she has framed the project as a way to make sure ordinary domestic history — the objects families grabbed on their way out the door, the embroidery techniques passed from mother to daughter — doesn't get flattened by news-cycle politics. Her training as an art historian, she says, helps her read the material culture in a keychain or a hand-me-down dress the way a more casual observer might not. The archive is still young — about 15 documented stories so far, gathered largely through Instagram and word of mouth in a community where trust has to be earned before family heirlooms and their attached memories get shared with a stranger holding a recorder. Alharbi has said she hopes to eventually build a bilingual website so the objects and interviews are more widely accessible than a single social media account allows. For now, the project stands as a small but growing counterweight to the idea that Chicago's Little Palestine is only a policy story or a headline — it's also, its curator insists, a neighborhood full of individual people who packed a life into a single suitcase.