Un pirámide: United States Afro-Latin American cities, counties, and institutional discourse in Florida’s public higher education

ABSTRACT US Afro-Latin Americans (ALAs), individuals who identify as Hispanic-Black or are descendants of Africans who lived in Latin America or the Caribbean, represent upward of 6 million people, yet researchers and policymakers have struggled to capture the experiences of this community using existing data systems. We explain how Florida’s distinct historical context shapes current higher education enrollment by ALAs in the state. Utilizing the conceptual framework of a hemispheric spatial-racial-discourse latch, we employ state, college, and institutional discourses to examine ALA representation across these data. The results indicate alignment between ALAs in the residential community and community colleges, while the discourse analysis shows that, despite some institutions engaging ALAs specifically, the vast majority leverage discursive proxies, such as language, ethnicity, and immigration, in their attempt to foreground ALAs. With limited data on ALAs, these findings illustrate the heightened need to abandon monolithic frames of Latinés.