The EDU Ledger: The next generation of Latino music leaders is being built in college classrooms
The most important Latin Grammy I have been part of was not won on a big commercial stage. It was won in a classroom.
I led a children’s music album built the way almost no album gets built: with a diverse, transnational team of University of Florida students, faculty and industry collaborators working side by side — students not as interns fetching coffee, but as co-creators making real production decisions. That album went on to win a Latin Grammy. I have produced more than 200 albums in my career, but that one taught me the most. It taught me that heritage is not only performed. It is taught.
As the nominees for the 27th Annual Latin Grammy Awards are announced this week, at the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month, we can do more to honor Latino musicians than just celebrate the giants like Bad Bunny, Shakira, Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. There is a whole other heritage story unfolding on ordinary Tuesday afternoons in classrooms like mine, where Latino students are learning not just to play the music of their ancestors but to own it, produce it, publish it and build businesses around it.
That distinction matters. For generations, Latino musicians were celebrated as performers while the business around them — the labels, the publishing, the catalogs — belonged to other people. My program in Music Business and Entrepreneurship at UF exists to break that pattern. When a student learns to negotiate a contract, read a royalty statement or launch a venture, they are not just building a career. They are reclaiming a piece of an industry their community helped create.