Where Diasporas Meet: AfroLatinx Educational Design in LA's Shifting Landscape

• In Event: Historicizing Los Angeles : Envisioning New Educational Futures in Latinx Radical Imaginations

Abstract

Krista Cortes brings attention to AfroLatinx pedagogies, mapping how educators and youth design Black-affirming educational spaces within Latinx-dominant schools. She interrogates mestizaje’s flattening discourse, centering Black embodiment and sonic practices that reveal alternative logics of belonging.
This paper examines how the Afro-Latino Education and Arts Collective in Los Angeles functions as an educational designer, creating learning ecologies that center blackness as a practice through their programming and community engagement. Drawing from analysis of the organization's digital archives, participant testimonials, and programmatic documentation, this study demonstrates how community-based organizations serve as sites of radical imagination where diverse AfroLatinx diasporas collaborate to design Black-affirming educational spaces (Cortes, 2021) that counter deficit narratives and foster joy, healing, and resilience (Jurow, Mendoza, and Cortes, 2025).
Grounding this work in Social Design Based Experiments (SDBEs) (Gutiérrez, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) and Afrocentric Research Design (ARD) (Hlela, 2018), the study positions blackness not as a fixed racial category but as a dynamic cultural practice that is continuously learned, negotiated, and transmitted across generations. An application of SDBE principles—re-mediation, historicity, equity, resilience, transformability, and sustainability—through an Afrocentric lens helps us to understand how the collective's programming creates learning environments that affirm participants' intersectional identities. Specifically, this paper draws from the ALEAC digital archive, analyzing and examining participant testimonials from workshops, cultural events, and educational programming, in order to document how the organization operationalizes care as a political act (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). The collective's mission to create "spaces where AfroLatinx identity is recognized, celebrated, and empowered" exemplifies transformative educational work that emerges from community organizing and cross-diasporic collaboration.
To take up Los Angeles as a "portal” means recognizing how the city's ever-changing demographic landscape creates unique conditions where different AfroLatinx diasporic communities encounter other diaspora groups, resulting in evolving engagements with identity, belonging, and community-building. The AfroLatinx Education and Arts Collective, serving LA's 47,000 AfroLatinx residents, represents a concrete manifestation of how communities navigate this complex diasporic terrain (Casellas Connors, 2025; Galdámez et al., 2023). Their programming reflects the dynamic nature of Los Angeles as a space where Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, Colombian, Garifuna and other AfroLatinx communities intersect with broader Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities, necessitating new forms of solidarity and collective identity formation.
This paper’s focus on Los Angeles-based organizing contributes to broader conversations. Ultimately, this paper positions community organizations as visionary designers whose work prefigures more just educational futures, offering concrete examples of how communities navigate complex diasporic landscapes while creating transformative learning experiences.

Author

• Krista L. Cortes, University of Pennsylvania