To date, the vast majority of scholarship on Middle Eastern diaspora communities has tended to focus on major migratory hubs such as the mega-cities of São Paulo, New York, or Buenos Aires. These studies have made great strides in destabilizing territorial frameworks that have heretofore naturalized the segregation of historical narratives of the Middle East and the Americas. However, scholarship’s focus on urban fulcrums, and the Arab-American intellectual, cultural, and political movements that arose in those milieus, has marginalized the histories of other Arab-American populations. From the southern United States, to high desert of the Argentine-Bolivian border, immigrants from the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean formed part of a trans-American network of Arab-American cultural production, political activism, and philanthropic campaigns. In particular, this paper examines philanthropy as a lens for elucidating the participation of two groups who have traditionally appeared only at the peripheries of scholarship on the Arab diaspora in the Americas: rural populations, and Arab-American women. By directing our attention to both multi-state/province, and international philanthropic networks within the Arab diaspora in the twentieth century, we are able to gain a clearer picture of two important aspects of Arab-American history: 1) the role that these networks played in building institutions (such as hospitals and banks), and 2) how philanthropic networks have assessed and addressed the needs of newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East. By focusing on the role of women philanthropists and institution-builders, this research also explores the gendered concept of the “enterprising spirit” (“espiritu emprendador” in Spanish) that many Syrian and Lebanese diasporic newspapers cited as the impetus for their community’s economic success. I argue that the general absence of women from historical narratives about twentieth century Mahjar communities in South America in part stems from this gendered “enterprising spirit” concept. This paper will also discuss the formulation of this research into a digital history project in collaboration with the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. By converting these data sets into publicly accessible, searchable material, the research is able to reach a wider audience at a time of heightened need for public history on the themes of gender and global migration.