“The current political climate definitely pushed this initiative to come to fruition,” said Ms. Delgadillo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants living in Los Angeles.

Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.

“It’s not easy being a student, being a student anywhere, but especially at a place like Harvard,” Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former University of California regent who campaigned against racial preference in admissions, said sympathetically.

But events like black commencements, he continued, serve only to “amplify” racial differences. “College is the place where we should be teaching and preaching the view that you’re an individual, and choose your associates to be based on other factors rather than skin color,” he said.

“Think about it,” Mr. Connerly added. “These kids went to Harvard, and they less than anyone in our society should worry about feeling welcome and finding comfort zones. They don’t need that.”

The alternative ceremonies at Harvard had printed programs, and incorporated the pageantry, ritual and solemnity of traditional commencements, though without the diplomas, which were reserved for the official university commencement.

A few hours after the new “Harvard University Black Commencement” for the graduate schools, including the prestigious law, divinity, business, government and medical schools, about 120 students attended the third annual “Latinx” commencement. In the cavernous basement of a science building, where an animal skeleton dangled overhead and Latin music played, students received stoles with the words “Clase Del 2017” woven into them, while siblings devoured chocolate cupcakes.