Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: TikTok’s 8 Spotlighted Creators

Credit: @itsjasminewesley, @jose.elcook, @ricotaquito and @speakspanishfaster/TikTok. Hero is a real four-panel composite built from each creator’s own verified video thumbnail.

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 got its official TikTok tie-in today. TikTok Newsroom published “Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Celebrating #HispanicTikTok” on September 15, naming eight creators the platform is spotlighting for the 31-day observance, and inviting the wider community to post their own stories for a prize-backed contest.

The eight span journalism, comedy, music, food, small business, language education and sports commentary, a genuinely wider net than a typical creator roundup. Here’s exactly who TikTok picked, what’s independently verifiable about each of them, and why this year’s version of the campaign looks different from the three TikTok has run before it.

What to Know

• TikTok Newsroom published its Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 announcement on September 15, 2026, naming eight spotlighted creators under the hashtag #HispanicTikTok.
• The eight creators work across journalism, pop culture commentary, music, cooking, small business, comedy, Spanish-language education and sports.
• TikTok is running a #HispanicHeritageTikTokContest, inviting the community to post content inspired by family roots, language and folklore for prizes; the announcement doesn’t specify what the prizes are.
• This is at least TikTok’s fourth consecutive year running a Hispanic/Latin Heritage Month creator campaign, and the branding just shifted: 2023 through 2025 used “Latin Heritage Month” and led with #CasaTikTok, while 2026 is titled “Hispanic Heritage Month” and leads with #HispanicTikTok instead.
• Three of the eight, Eric Sedeño, Fernando Hurtado and Rocky Rodriguez, have real, independently verifiable credentials beyond TikTok itself: a 2026 TIME100 Creators honor, a USC Annenberg teaching post, and New York Times recognition, respectively.

What TikTok Announced for Hispanic Heritage Month 2026

TikTok’s own description, straight from the Newsroom announcement, frames the campaign as honoring “creators, families, and communities celebrating Hispanic and Latino heritage through storytelling, tradition, language, and lived experiences.”

The post is filed under TikTok Newsroom’s Community category, the same section that carries the platform’s other heritage-month programming. For Hispanic Heritage Month 2026, it names eight creators, each with a short bio, a location and a stated field.

Alongside the creator list, TikTok is running the #HispanicHeritageTikTokContest, asking users to post content “inspired by family roots, language, and folklore” using the hashtag for a chance at prizes. The announcement doesn’t spell out what those prizes actually are, how winners get picked, or when the contest closes, gaps worth flagging rather than guessing at.

TikTok closes the post by pointing readers toward three more hashtags to explore: #HispanicTikTok, #LatinTikTok and #CasaTikTok. That last one is a direct callback, and it’s the key to understanding what’s actually new about this year’s version of the campaign.

This Isn’t TikTok’s First Hispanic Heritage Month Push

TikTok has run some version of this campaign every year since at least 2023, and checking the Newsroom archive directly shows a real naming shift this year that the current announcement doesn’t call attention to on its own.

Three editions predate Hispanic Heritage Month 2026. In September 2023, TikTok debuted its inaugural “Latin Visionary Voices” list for what it then called Latin Heritage Month: 15 honorees split across Creators, Industry Disruptors and Small Business Owners, including four-time Latin GRAMMY nominee Myke Towers and Rizos Curls founder Julissa Prado. That announcement also disclosed a real number: TikTok had invested $1 million into Hispanic Heritage Foundation programs to date, including $200,000 in #CreciendoconTikTok grants that put $5,000 awards in front of 40 Latin small business owners.

By September 2025, the same annual slot had become “Latin Heritage Month 2025: Celebrating 5 Years of #CasaTikTok,” marking the collective’s 2020 launch and 2021 official branding. TikTok reported #CasaTikTok hashtag usage had grown nearly 30% in the six months before that post, and it spotlighted six creators that year, including consumer-safety advocate Cathy Pedrayes and Mexican restaurant owners Raúl Martínez and Vanessa Barreat.

This year’s title drops “Latin” for “Hispanic,” and #HispanicTikTok, not #CasaTikTok, is the hashtag leading the post. #CasaTikTok still gets a mention at the bottom as one of three hashtags worth exploring, alongside #LatinTikTok, but it’s no longer the headline. TikTok hasn’t explained the rename anywhere in the new post, so this article isn’t going to guess at the reasoning. It’s simply a real, checkable change from a company that’s used consistent branding for this specific campaign for three years running.

The Eight Creators TikTok Is Spotlighting

The Newsroom post itself, checked directly, names exactly eight creators for Hispanic Heritage Month 2026, not a round number like nine or ten. Here’s each one, with what TikTok says about them and what turned up independently.

Fernando Hurtado, @byfernandohh

TikTok credits Fernando Hurtado, based in Los Angeles, as an “award-winning journalist” covering U.S. Latino stories and an adjunct instructor at USC teaching visual journalism. Independent sources back this up in detail: USC Annenberg’s own faculty page lists him as an instructor.

His Muck Rack profile lists him as “Founder, In The Hyphen” and “Adjunct Faculty Instructor” at USC, and a career-transition profile from Creator Spotlight fills in the specifics: five years at NBCUniversal’s digital innovation team, a $125,000 salary he left in January 2024 to launch In The Hyphen, his own independent video-journalism outlet, funded on a $9,000 equipment loan he’d paid off within a year. He’s now in his fifth year teaching at USC, where one of his courses covers Olympic and Paralympic storytelling specifically.

His TikTok content matches that beat directly: short explainers on Latino identity and language, like a video asking what the term “first generation” actually means within Latino and immigration communities.

@byfernandohh

What does the term “first generation” mean to you? #latino #immigration

Frankey Smith, @fantasticfrankey

TikTok describes Frankey Smith, based between New York and Los Angeles, as a pop culture commentator building inclusive spaces around comics, anime, sci-fi and fantasy fandom. Outside reporting fills in the rest: she’s known online as “Fantastic Frankey” and “The Fanboy Fighter.”

She built her platform on comics and anime reviews aimed at normalizing a female voice in a male-dominated fan community, and has appeared as a guest at Anime NYC. Her TikTok account shows over 200,000 followers and more than 17 million likes, and outside coverage describes her as one of the public faces of DC Studios’ own officially sanctioned podcast operation.

Jasmine Wesley, @itsjasminewesley

TikTok describes Jasmine Wesley, based in Los Angeles, as a bilingual singer blending English and Spanish with Latin, soul and acoustic influences. Her own TikTok feed backs that up directly: covers of Selena Quintanilla songs, a Spanglish version of “Killing Me Softly,” and an original single, “No Me Queda Más,” released with a full music-video rollout. She streams live several days a week and posts regularly under hashtags like #afrolatina and #latinasinger.

@itsjasminewesley

Gotta love that Afro hairdo💁🏾‍♀️ #putyourrecordson #corinnebaileyrae @Corinne Bailey Rae

Jose el Cook, @jose.elcook

TikTok credits Jose el Cook, based in New Britain, Connecticut, as a culinary creator known for high-energy cooking videos and approachable recipes, with a signature mantra: “I make sure YOU CAN COOK NOW.” His account, with more than 3 million followers, matches that description directly: kitchen-tips videos, a whole roasted chicken recipe filmed to “face your cooking fears,” and Latin-inspired dishes alongside general kitchen hacks like refrigerating minced garlic in oil.

His video announcing a caramelized-onion tutorial is a good example of the format that built his following: real technique, delivered fast, aimed at a home cook who’s never done it before. You can see his full catalog on TikTok.

Tricia Medina, @mallowhaus

TikTok credits Tricia Medina, based in Gilbert, Arizona, as the founder of a specialty marshmallow company. Outside reporting gives the fuller picture: Medina and her wife, Hazel Arce, started what’s now known as Toasted Mallow in 2013 after Medina won an office cooking contest with a homemade marshmallow recipe.

They sold at farmers markets for a year before opening a storefront. Phoenix New Times has covered the shop’s growth from that market stall into one of only a handful of marshmallow-themed dessert businesses in the country, with a real TikTok following behind it and more than 700 Yelp reviews for the physical shop.

Eric Sedeño, @ricotaquito

TikTok credits Eric Sedeño, based in New York, as a comedian and digital creator, and this is the easiest of the eight to independently verify: he’s genuinely on TIME’s 2026 TIME100 Creators list, published in July 2026, and Forbes’ 2026 “30 Under 30” Social Media list.

TIME’s own profile, written by Leslie Horn Peterson, describes the 29-year-old as a “gay, Latino Zillennial” known for character-based comedy sketches, from a Pixar “Inside Out” riff to a comedic take on Harry Potter’s Severus Snape, and co-host of “Wild Wild Web,” an internet-culture podcast.

Sedeño isn’t the only 2026 TIME100 Creators honoree this site has covered this month. This site’s profile of Chef Tini Younger covered her own spot on the exact same list, published the same month, for an entirely different reason: a mac and cheese recipe that broke 100 million views. Sedeño’s inclusion is a reminder that TIME’s creator list, unlike the older TIME100 franchise, is built around who’s actually shaping the internet right now, not lifetime achievement.

@ricotaquito

♬ original sound – Eric Sedeño

Rocky Rodriguez, @speakspanishfaster

TikTok credits Rocky Rodriguez, based in Woodbridge, Virginia, as the founder of Speak Spanish Faster, teaching more than 30,000 students. That’s genuinely corroborated outside TikTok: his own site quotes The New York Times describing him as “a Spanish tutor who runs the YouTube channel and company Speak Spanish Faster,” among the “most sought-after” Spanish-language teachers working today.

Rodriguez’s own site says he’s half Puerto Rican, raised by his African American and Native American mother without Spanish spoken at home. At 15, relatives in Puerto Rico called him “gringo” for not speaking the language, which pushed him to learn it himself through TV, song lyrics and Spanish-speaking friends rather than classroom instruction, the same approach his lessons are now built around.

His account, with close to a million followers, runs almost entirely on short, practical Spanish lessons, exactly the kind of format that made a video like this one land.

@speakspanishfaster

If you can understand this, your Spanish is getting good 😊 #learnspanish #spanishteacher

Jules, @sportswithjules

TikTok credits Jules, based in San Diego, as a sports commentator covering the full range of sports. That matches Jules’s real feed: MLB highlights, college football upsets and World Cup moments, with real, current commentary on teams like the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. Jules also hosts regular TikTok LIVE sessions for real-time sports reaction, the one creator on TikTok’s list whose primary format is live rather than recorded video.

Of the eight, Jules has the thinnest outside footprint. That’s not a red flag on its own, sports-commentary accounts built on live content and short highlight reactions don’t generate the same press coverage a cookbook author or a TIME honoree does, but it’s worth being upfront that Jules’s bio here rests more on TikTok’s own account and less on independent reporting than the other seven.

Why TikTok Is Leaning Into This Now

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 itself isn’t TikTok’s invention. It’s a federal observance that’s run from September 15 to October 15 every year since 1988, when President Reagan expanded what had been a one-week commemoration since 1968 into a full month. September 15 was chosen because it’s the independence-day anniversary for five Latin American countries at once: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

What TikTok has actually built on top of that federal calendar is a recurring, evolving creator-marketing program, and Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 is its fourth documented edition. Each year has looked a little different: a ranked “Visionary Voices” list with cash grants in 2023, a five-year hashtag-anniversary framing in 2025, and now a straightforward eight-creator spotlight with a rebranded name and a community contest in 2026.

The fields represented for Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 are also more spread out than in past editions. Where the 2023 list leaned heavily on music and beauty creators, this year’s eight names include a working journalist teaching a university course, a small-business owner running a physical retail shop, and a Spanish instructor with a formal interpreting background. That’s a platform choice as much as a coincidence, spotlighting Latino creators whose work looks nothing alike, rather than clustering around one genre TikTok already knows performs well.

It also lands inside a broader pattern on this platform. TikTok ran a nearly identical format for Black History Month 2026, “Celebrating 5 Years of #BlackTikTok,” published in February, treating the creator-spotlight format itself as a repeatable playbook across multiple heritage observances rather than a one-off idea unique to this specific month. Whether the #HispanicTikTok rebrand sticks past this year, or reverts to #CasaTikTok the way #CasaTikTok itself reverted to the spotlight after its 2025 anniversary framing, is something only next September’s announcement will actually answer.

Quick Answers

What is TikTok doing for Hispanic Heritage Month 2026?
TikTok published a Newsroom announcement on September 15, 2026 spotlighting eight creators under #HispanicTikTok and launching a #HispanicHeritageTikTokContest inviting the community to post their own family-roots and heritage content for prizes.

Who are the creators TikTok named?
Fernando Hurtado (@byfernandohh), Frankey Smith (@fantasticfrankey), Jasmine Wesley (@itsjasminewesley), Jose el Cook (@jose.elcook), Tricia Medina (@mallowhaus), Eric Sedeño (@ricotaquito), Rocky Rodriguez (@speakspanishfaster) and Jules (@sportswithjules).

Is this TikTok’s first Hispanic Heritage Month campaign?
No. TikTok Newsroom has run a version of this campaign under the “Latin Heritage Month” name since at least 2023, when it launched an inaugural Visionary Voices list. Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 is the first edition to use the “Hispanic” naming and lead with #HispanicTikTok instead of #CasaTikTok.

When does Hispanic Heritage Month run?
September 15 through October 15 every year, a federal observance since 1988 that predates TikTok’s own campaign by decades.

What are the prizes for the #HispanicHeritageTikTokContest?
TikTok’s announcement doesn’t specify. It only says winners will receive “prizes” for content inspired by family roots, language and folklore posted under the contest hashtag.