COCONUT CREEK, Fla. -- The gaudy plastic palms blaze with light, speakers boom the cucu bop, cucu bop, rhythm of salsa -- and the floor at the Goldcoast Ballroom quickly fills.
A Mexican-American relocating from Chicago for her sales job swivels on the gleaming hardwood with a Peruvian student. A long-haired paparazzo from Ecuador whirls beside a woman from the Dominican Republic. Elegantly turned out in a slate-gray suit, and making catlike moves, one of the legends of Latin dance, Pedro Aguilar, 77, known as ''Cuban Pete," takes a spin.
Despite his nickname, Cuban Pete is Puerto Rican, raised in New York. Perhaps the most celebrated mambo dancer of all time, he moved to the Miami area in 1982, and has been witness to the large-scale arrival of New Latins.
''It's not just Cubans in Florida anymore," Aguilar says. ''It's people from all over Latin America."
In a demographic shift with implications for politics as well as the minutiae of life -- including the use of parks and the kinds of foods sold in supermarkets -- Florida's Latinos, more than 2.6 million and growing each day, are undergoing a metamorphosis. Cubans and Cuban Americans, long the majority in the state, have been reduced to a distinct, if still dominant, minority.
What's more, in large part because of the newcomers, people of Spanish language and heritage are no longer concentrated in a few locations like Miami's Little Havana, settled by refugees fleeing Fidel Castro's Cuba, or the older district of Ybor City in Tampa.
There is now a Little Caracas of Venezuelans in the Miami suburb of Doral, a Colombian enclave in the Broward County city of Weston, and pockets of Guatemalans in Lake Worth, near Palm Beach.
In rural inland towns like Immokalee and Sebring, food markets with names like Azteca cater to Mexican farmworkers, and sell votive candles with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's saint. In formerly Anglo suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, gas stations offer hot Argentine beef turnovers.
For Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, Florida's sixth-largest city, the most significant trend is the surge in Latinos, chiefly Puerto Ricans.
''We now have about 400,000 Hispanic residents in central Florida," said Dyer, who is a Democrat.
Almost a half-million Puerto Ricans make up 18 percent of Florida Latinos, Mexicans are another 13 percent. The 2000 census found almost 1 million Floridians with Hispanic roots -- including Colombians, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans, Argentines.
Some of Florida's New Latins are poor and illiterate, and in the United States illegally. Many, though, are entrepreneurs or professionals.
''Whatever country you talk about, with the exception of the Mariel boatlift, it's the middle and upper class," John T. Gaubatz, a law professor at the University of Miami, said of the 1980 immigration by boat of more than 100,000 Cubans to South Florida. ''Just pick your Latin American country, and if things get dicey, there'll be another wave of successful and well-off people to Florida."
Because of Argentina's economic collapse, Colombia's guerrilla war, Venezuela's political turmoil and the woes of other nations in the Southern Hemisphere, there are countless new Dairy Queen franchisees, restaurateurs and other business owners now in the Sunshine State.
New Latins have injected new life into the places they have settled. One seven-block strip of Collins Avenue in Miami Beach was suffering from the exodus of Jewish retirees; it has been revitalized by new businesses representing half a dozen South American countries, including a Brazilian martial arts studio, a Peruvian seafood restaurant, and an Argentine grocery.
Every Sunday, the complex cocktail of Hispanidad Florida-style goes on display under the mirrored ball at the Goldcoast, located in a in Coconut Creek, a bedroom suburb of Fort Lauderdale. For a $10 entry fee, men and women can sway for three hours to salsa, mambo, merengue, and other Latin music.
Surrounded by friends and fans, and squiring his partner, Barbara Craddock, Cuban Pete celebrated his 77th birthday at the ballroom.
Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, knows firsthand about the blending of Latin cultures. The 33-year-old Coral Gables lawyer and Republican majority leader in the state House is married to a Colombian-American.
''I describe my two daughters, Amanda, 4, and Daniella, 2, as Colombanas -- half Cuban, half Colombian, and 100 percent American," Rubio said.