This study investigates Latina/o students' experiences of racial microaggressions and how they cope with them through semi-structured and open-ended interviews with students attending a primarily White higher education institution in the Midwestern United States. Borrowing from Sue et al.'s (2007) categories of racial microaggressions and discussing their relationship to Bonilla-Silva's (2014) color-blind racism, we illustrate the diverse ways in which Latina/o college students experience racial microaggressions and how these experiences varied by gender and skin color. Addressing a gap in the literature that examines Latina/o college students' coping mechanisms, we develop a coping-mechanism typology consisting of external coping mechanisms (i.e., interest-based counterspaces and race-and ethnic-based counterspaces) and internal coping mechanisms (i.e., color-blind coping mechanism and racially cognizant coping mechanism) that may be useful for future research into how minority populations cope in a variety of settings as well as for higher education institutions that intend to increase educational attainment among Latinas/os.

No abstract