The Lincoln Center Festival has long been recognized as a cultural melting pot. But this year, one flavor dominates the rest as the festival’s theater offerings take a distinctly Latin turn. Over the next month, the festival will present four major productions of Spanish-language works. Chile’s Compañía Teatro Cinema begins the Festival’s Spanish-language offerings on July 10 with “Gemelos,” a play based on the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof’s novel “The Notebook.” Mexico’s Ciertos Habitantes will present “De Monstruos y Prodigios: La Historia de los Castrati,” which tracks three centuries of cutaway vocal achievement in a style mixing live vocal, violin, and harpsichord performance with extreme physical comedy. Argentina’s “Un Hombre se que Ahoga” is a free adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” by troupe Proyecto Chejov. And “Divinas Palabras” comes via the Centro Drámatico Nacional of Madrid, Spain, and brings the tragicomic spectacle of wretched Galician villagers captivated by a devil-like rogue who offers a shot at redemption.

But even as these works penetrate one of the New York’s highest-profile institutions, the impresarios of both Lincoln Center and a growing number of Spanish language and Latino theater festivals in the city struggle to make sure that the city’s lasting demographic change creates more than passing cultural fashion.

“It’s about time that the Lincoln Center Festival chose this work,” the co-director of Cinema Tropical and former director of film and performing arts at the Mexican Cultural Institute, Carlos Gutiérrez, said. “The question for me is, why did it take so long?”

The answer is that only last year did a powerful programming force meet a unique opportunity. In early 2006, Olga Garay had just left her post as program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, a major donor to Lincoln Center. While having lunch with the head of the Lincoln Center Festival, Nigel Redden, Ms. Garay mentioned her curatorial dream of mounting a major program of modern Spanish-language theater in New York.

Ms. Garay had originally approached the Public Theater, which had mounted the Festival Latino in the 1980s, with her idea. “This is more in tone with the mission of the Public Theater,” Mr. Garay said. “But it so happened that they were entering their 50th anniversary year and were overwhelmed.”

Mr. Redden, however, was interested, and offered an $800,000 budget, which was $300,000 more than Ms. Garay had spent bringing five productions from the Miami festival to New York back in 2001. With additional money from other donors, the budget rose to $1.5 million, according to Ms. Garay.

And while the shows being produced at the Lincoln Center Festival are certainly the largest in scale and scope, smaller New York-based Latino theater festivals have seen an upsurge in the past year, each finding its own mix of the Spanish and English, local and international, and each with a head now casting an admiring or critical eye toward Lincoln Center. This is, of course, in addition to some 40 seasons of bilingual work by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Spanish work by Repertorio Español, 30 years of bilingual work by the Thalia Spanish Theater of Sunnyside, Queens, and almost as many years by Pregones in the Bronx.

“The LCT festival represents a change in the landscape of the city,” Claudia Norman, the director of the festival Celebrate Mexico Now!, which is currently preparing for its fourth season in September, said. “Demographics prove this [year] is not a coincidence.” To her, any attention paid to the festival is a boon to her own. “I will see it as a justification to ask for more funding to keep doing it.”

“The more [Latino work] is produced, the more this ecological imbalance will get fixed, said Susana Tubert, the founder of TeatroStageFest, which made its debut last May with works from as far away as her native Argentina and as close as the Bronx’s Pregones. “I hope in the future, it won’t be such an anomaly to present a Latino artist in a season of mainstream theater, it will be part of the fiber of New York.”

The festival’s foreign offerings have also left some local leaders in the field questioning why the best of everything must be imported. “Back in the ’80s, when the Public did the Festival Latino, that was an attempt to blend the local and the global,” said Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, the former associate director for Arts and Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation and now an independent scholar. “[Lincoln Center] is rooted in the high culture premise of bringing the best from anywhere. But the best from anywhere is also here.”

Still, most simply see the programming as a positive step in the right direction. “It could be that next year no one does it, but it doesn’t seem like just a trend,” said Shoshana Polanco, the creative producer of last year’s Buenos Aires in Translation festival at P.S. 122 and now a consultant to Lincoln Center Festival. She makes an effort to separate the political from the cultural, and the cultural from the ethnic. “To look at things ethnically is for an archeologist. We have to be looser, and absorb whatever we have to absorb,” she said, recalling how her own festival defied and expanded notions of the Argentine.

The future of Spanish offerings at Lincoln Center, though, is unclear. Ms. Garay is shifting her focus to Los Angeles, where she was recently appointed director of the department of cultural affairs, and Mr. Redden, on his part, made no promise regarding future programming. “It’s a fact that we haven’t done it in 11 years. It doesn’t mean that we will wait 11 years to do it again.”