Student resilience refers to the ability of students to perform well in school despite challenging socioeconomic backgrounds, and it is of particular importance for those countries or regions which struggle the most with economic development. Our paper contributes to the literature on the topic by proposing an innovative and comprehensive measure of resilience, based on the overperformance of students compared to their predicted achievements given their gender and socioeconomic background. We investigate the main determinants of student overperformance in the Latin American countries that took part in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), also comparing our estimations across the different educational domains surveyed by the assessment. Our results show that in the region, the impact of the socioeconomic background on overperformance differs depending on whether it is considered at the country, school, or student level. Moreover, sense of belonging and curiosity are also correlated to increased educational performance, while mixed results are found for school safety. Our results provide new and comprehensive evidence to inform policy recommendations for countries where students struggle with difficult socioeconomic background.