Yes, you did a great job pulling that ACT score up, and the effort will pay off.
The only reason anyone is saying that higher would be nice is that the bar we’re looking at is not only getting IN at competitive schools, but getting substantial merit money. That’s a really, really high bar. Keeping a college budget under 20K/year without financial aid is challenging, and stat-based merit of that magnitude is only going to go to a tiny percentage of applicants.
So basically… going out of state to a very good school should be a completely attainable goal. You’re just probably not going to a state that touches an ocean. But the public U’s mentioned up-thread through MSEP in Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Minnesota - all very doable. And look further into the schools with Hispanic Scholar merit. Here’s a post from one of this year’s applicants (thank you @BriTexan ) http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21225977/#Comment_21225977 I believe I’ve read that Florida State is discontinuing their scholarship this year. But Arizona State and the Barrett Honors College… U of New Mexico… UA Birmingham… U of Kentucky… (and Nebraska, where the NHS deal trumps the MSEP deal)… you can definitely get out of state and even out of your region, and go to an excellent school, within your budget. You can go to a small public LAC, a large public U, or a smaller Honors College within a large public U. You have excellent options - it’s just a finite menu of excellent options because of the limited budget. The fact that it would take stratospheric stats to broaden those options doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your stats the way they are.