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.
I know this pattern personally. I came up as a Puerto Rican kid with a flute, moving between Latin music, jazz and classical worlds, learning early that talent opens doors but ownership decides what is on the other side of them. Everything I teach now — from publishing splits to artist entrepreneurship — is the curriculum I wish someone had handed me at age 20. My students get it at 20. That is the whole point.
The children’s album was a laboratory for that philosophy. Students from different countries and musical traditions had to do what professionals do: arrange, record, mix, meet deadlines, settle creative disagreements and deliver a finished product to the world. The difference was that every decision doubled as a lesson. A mixing choice was also a seminar in critical listening. A copyright registration was also a seminar in ownership.
By the time the Latin Grammy arrived, the trophy felt almost secondary. The real product was the cohort of young professionals who now knew — from experience rather than lecture — how the industry works.
And the ripple effects compound. Students from that children’s album project went on to produce records, teach in schools and start companies of their own. Each one of them carries the tradition forward, not as a museum piece but as a living enterprise. That is how culture actually survives, through transmission by people with the tools to sustain it.
The cost of not teaching this is visible everywhere in Latin music history: catalogs sold too cheaply, publishing signed away by teenagers who became stars and master recordings owned by everyone except the people who made them. Every one of those stories began in a room where nobody explained the paperwork. A classroom that teaches ownership stops those stories from repeating.
Universities, especially public ones, are part of cultural infrastructure. They are where a first-generation Latino student from Tampa, or a kid from San Juan who arrived in Gainesville with a guitar, can become not just a musician but a music business owner. If we are serious about Hispanic heritage, we should be as invested in those classrooms as we are in the award shows.
We should be talking about not just who is on stage, but who owns the stage, who built it and who is teaching the next crew to build the next one. Ownership is the difference between being celebrated by an industry and being an industry.
So this September and October, celebrate the legends. Then ask the harder question: Who is teaching the next ones? The greatest tribute we can offer the giants of Latin music is not a tribute concert. It is a classroom full of young Latino creators who know their history, own their work and are already building what comes next. Every Hispanic Heritage Month, we celebrate the music. The other 11 months, we should be teaching it.
José Valentino Ruiz is an associate professor of music business and entrepreneurship at the University of Florida and an associate member of the AI for Health Institute at the UF College of Medicine. He is a multi-Latin Grammy Award-winning composer, producer and recording engineer.
