Perreo University Launches as a New Home for Reggaeton, Caribbean Culture & Diasporic Scholarship

MEDIA KIT

The digital university opens with Perreo 101®, Tego Calderón: The Syllabus, and Femme Fatale, bringing academic rigor, cultural knowledge, and diasporic lived experience into the classroom.

October 1, 2025

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Los Angeles, CA–Perreo University is officially establishing itself as a new kind of academic space: one where reggaeton, Caribbean identity, Blackness, queerness, gender, sexuality, and diasporic culture are not treated as side conversations, but as subjects worthy of serious study.

The university’s first course is Perreo 101®, the academic extension of the Perreo 101® cultural education platform created by La Gata. Since its launch, Perreo 101® has challenged conventional ideas about what belongs in a classroom — examining reggaeton as music, history, politics, identity, economics, language, and social movement.

Perreo University’s inaugural academic programming also includes Tego Calderón: The Syllabus, taught by La Gata alongside Dr. Nic Rodriguez of UC San Diego and Dr. Megan Curet, and Femme Fatale, a course exploring gender and sexuality in reggaeton featuring DJ Sabi, Inaru, Nadia J.D., and Isabella Arellano.

The university’s academic programming kicked off in October 2025 with a majority-Boricua faculty representing the Puerto Rican diaspora, establishing a foundational commitment to scholarship that reflects the communities whose cultural contributions have historically been studied, commodified, or celebrated without always being given institutional authority over the narrative.

An Academic Response to a Changing Higher Education Landscape

Perreo University was born during a period of profound upheaval across American higher education.

In recent years, universities have faced growing political pressure surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, with the Trump administration’s federal policies targeting DEI programs and threatening federal funding for institutions that did not align with administration priorities. These pressures have contributed to universities restructuring or renaming programs, reducing DEI infrastructure, and reconsidering how they approach scholarship centered on race, gender, sexuality, and marginalized communities.

For Perreo University, that moment raised a larger question:

What happens to rigorous cultural scholarship when traditional institutions become less willing or able to fund it?

The answer was not to abandon academia — but to build another door into it.

Perreo University was conceived as a response to the shrinking institutional space for diverse academic inquiry, particularly scholarship examining popular culture through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, migration, and diaspora.

Its mission is to make that scholarship accessible while maintaining the intellectual depth, critical thinking, and expertise expected of serious academic study.

From the Classroom to the Culture

The university also emerges from the larger Perreo 101® ecosystem, including the Perreo 101® Tour.

The political and institutional climate surrounding DEI has had consequences beyond university campuses. The resulting pressure on cultural institutions, educational partnerships, sponsors, and organizations committed to diverse programming has also created challenges for the Perreo 101® Tour, which seeks to bring this scholarship directly into communities across the United States.

Perreo University therefore represents more than an online course platform. It is an effort to create an intellectual and cultural infrastructure that does not depend entirely on traditional institutions deciding which communities, subjects, and scholars are worthy of investment.

The Faculty Is the Curriculum

At the center of Perreo University is its faculty.

Rather than separating “academic experts” from the people who have lived, created, DJed, danced, documented, produced, and shaped these cultures, the university brings scholars and cultural practitioners into the same classroom.

Its inaugural faculty reflects that philosophy — combining university-trained researchers with artists, DJs, cultural workers, and people whose expertise comes from years of direct participation in the cultures being studied.

“Perreo has always been knowledge,” says La Gata, founder of Perreo University and creator of Perreo 101®. “We just weren’t always calling it a university course.”

Perreo University’s curriculum treats reggaeton and its surrounding cultures as legitimate fields of inquiry while asking bigger questions about who gets to produce knowledge, who gets funded to study it, and whose history becomes part of the official record.

A University Built for the Diaspora

Perreo University is designed for a generation that does not necessarily see a separation between the classroom and culture.

Its students may be academics, artists, DJs, journalists, producers, dancers, educators, music-industry professionals, or simply people who want to understand the cultural forces that shaped them.

The university’s approach is intentionally bilingual, diasporic, interdisciplinary, and culturally grounded.

From Puerto Rico to New York, the Dominican Republic to Miami, Panama to Los Angeles, and across the Caribbean diaspora, Perreo University recognizes that cultural education does not stop at geographic borders.

The classroom is wherever the culture lives.

About Perreo University

Perreo University is an independent cultural education platform dedicated to the academic study of reggaeton, Caribbean and diasporic culture, music, gender, sexuality, race, identity, and the social forces surrounding popular culture.

Founded by La Gata, Perreo University’s inaugural curriculum includes Perreo 101®, Tego Calderón: The Syllabus, and Femme Fatale, with additional courses and cultural programming expanding the university’s academic ecosystem.

Perreo University exists to preserve, study, question, and teach the cultures that continue to shape the world.

Learn the culture. Study the culture. Own the narrative.

Media Contact:
Perreo University
Keyla Eccleston [email protected]
https://perreouniversity.com

INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | TIKTOK | FACEBOOK | TWITTER |