This is part of an occasional series of stories looking at race and the arts, where color and culture collide in South Florida and the United States. When Anna in the Tropics caught the theater world by surprise and snagged the Pulitzer Prize for drama in April, an exultant Nilo Cruz cried into his cellphone, ``Miami, Cuba and all the Latinos got a Pulitzer Prize today!'' Symbolically, the Cuban-American playwright who grew up in Miami is right: No one of Hispanic descent has ever won drama's most prestigious prize, and the fact that Cruz's sensuous, poetic play vaulted to those heights -- after having been staged at only the tiny New Theatre in Coral Gables -- makes the honor all the more wondrous.

In fact, Cruz's honor is just the latest and most high-profile event in the ascension of Hispanic-American playwrights. In 1994, Eduardo Machado's Floating Islands -- a four-play, six-hour epic inspired by his own Cuban family -- was staged as marathon ''event'' theater at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 1999-2000, New York's high-profile Signature Theatre Company devoted its entire season to the work of avant-garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes, the Cuban-American writer who mentored both Machado and Cruz.

''I think Nilo's Pulitzer will only be good,'' says José Rivera, himself an award-winning playwright whose work is done all over the United States. ``It will create a greater accessibility for this work.''

Others, though, aren't so sure that things are really changing for Hispanic-American playwrights, and for Hispanic theater in America.

Machado, the playwright and Columbia University professor whose Once Removed just ended its run at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, has his doubts.

''I go to the Humana Festival [at Actors Theatre of Louisville], and I'm the hit of the festival, but no one calls to ask if I have another play,'' says Machado, whose play When the Sea Drowns in Sand (later retitled Havana Is Waiting) was a Humana hit in 2001.

'Years ago someone said to me, `You know, Eduardo, it's Cubans.' I said, 'No, it's people.' There's this deeply ingrained prejudice that the audience won't relate to these plays, because they see them as being about second-class citizens.''

Cruz, whose Pulitzer-winning play about Cuban cigar-makers in Ybor City in 1929 is poised to make the leap to Broadway next season, is a playwright whose work is done at many major regional theaters; the experimental Lorca in a Green Dress, for instance, is about to have its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Yet he, too, feels the discomfort of having his work looked at through the prism of ethnicity, of fitting into a theater's one-per-season Hispanic-American playwright ``slot.''

'I always had problems with the `slot' mentality,'' Cruz says. 'It puts us in competition with each other. You should look at the play and its artistic value. Not what it's trying to say about `brown' people.''

MORE NUMEROUS

Truth be told, Hispanic theater -- in both English and in Spanish -- is growing right along with America's Hispanic population. And, says playwright Michael John Garcés, ``We want our work to be seen as part of the American canon. Because America is what it is now, and our work is not part of a subgroup.''

Adds actor Chaz Mena, who has performed with the major Hispanic companies in New York, ``[Many] Hispanic plays are ultimately about people who live in the United States. Nilo Cruz and I went to the same high school. He's very much an American playwright.''

From the days when Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes and Mexican-American playwright Luis Valdez were among the few well-known names to today, when there are dozens of established and emerging writers, the number of Hispanic-American playwrights writing in English has soared. Stylistically and thematically, says Juliette Carrillo, director of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., ``There's no consistent pattern to what they write. It depends on the writer. Most writers do write what they know.''

Long-established companies such as New York's Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Repertorio Español and INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center have been joined by such major developmental programs as the Latino Theatre Initiative (LTI) at the Mark Taper Forum and the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep.

In South Florida this week, the 18th International Hispanic Theatre Festival is about to offer its yearly feast of theater from around the world (this year including companies from Japan and Slovenia), and City Theatre's Summer Shorts 2003 features plays from Puerto Rican-American playwright Rivera and the young Cuban-American playwright Marco Ramirez. Several ambitious Spanish-language companies -- Venevision International (which has staged Master Class and plans to do A Chorus Line, both at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts), Teatro Abanico, Teatro 8 -- are adding to the depth and variety of productions available to those who prefer their theater en español.

The area's English-language companies, too, have embraced the work of Hispanic-American playwrights. The Coconut Grove Playhouse has done a number of Hispanic plays. Actors' Playhouse did well with a long run of 4 Guys Named José, and it has staged Evita in both English and Spanish. The Miami Light Project commissioned the Chicano troupe Culture Clash to create 1994's Radio Mambo, a piece about Miami that toured to other cities after its premiere here.

Broward's Sol Theatre just finished a run of Rivera's Marisol. Florida Stage, just south of Palm Beach, was the first South Florida company to do one of Cruz's plays when it staged A Park in Our House in 1998.

And then there's the 104-seat New Theatre in Coral Gables, the company that commissioned Cruz's Anna in the Tropics and, by association, shares in his glory. Artistic director Rafael de Acha previously staged the world premiere of Cruz's Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams and will offer another when he puts on Beauty of the Father in January. He has also produced Rivera's Cloud Tectonics and has backed the work of Argentine journalist-playwright Mario Diament, launching the world premieres of The Book of Ruth, Smithereens and, in March, Blind Date -- something, Diament says, ``that means the world: I have a theater, funding, a cast and rehearsal dates even before I have the play finished.''

Still buoyed by the joy of Cruz's Pulitzer, De Acha says, ``This has validated Nilo's work, but it has also made the establishment sit up and listen to what's going on the the regions. And in the regions, there's a lot of Hispanic work.''

TWO PER SEASON?

De Acha's willingness to stage those back-to-back premieres by Cruz and Diament next season is a rarity, at least for a theater that doesn't have as its mission the development of Hispanic plays and playwrights.

Says Rivera, whose play Impact is part of Summer Shorts 2003, ``I have yet to see more than one Hispanic play per season [at a major regional theater].''

Young Cuban-American playwright Rogelio Martínez, who has had three plays staged in South Florida by former Area Stage artistic director John Rodaz, wishes more companies would try that.

''I would love for a regional theater two take on two Latino writers in one season,'' Martínez says over lunch near New York's Lincoln Center. 'It would give the audience a context; it would say to the audience, `Look, there are different Latino voices, and they can be so different.' ''

As are the audiences for those plays.

''Will the Cubans support the Puerto Ricans? Is it the Cubans vs. the Chicanos? We're the majority minority, but we hold onto our individual cultures,'' says Martínez.

Mario Ernesto Sánchez, artistic director of both Coral Gables' Teatro Avante and the International Hispanic Theatre Festival, agrees that getting one Hispanic audience to embrace a play about another can be difficult.

''If a Venezuelan company comes to the festival, [then] the Venezuelans come. It's very turfy,'' he says.

René Buch discovered the same thing when he cofounded Repertorio Español in 1968 and discovered that he got mixed Latino audiences by ''. . . doing the classics: Lorca, Lope de Vega, Calderón. They are the only thing that unified us,'' and now there's more crossover in Repertorio's audiences.

Miguel Ferro, who produces Venevision's plays in South Florida, has found another way to avoid self-segregated audiences.

''I worked with Argentinian, Venezuelan and Cuban actresses in Confesiones de mujeres de 30 [Confessions of 30-Year-Old Women],'' Ferro says. ``It's truly music to your ears when you hear those [different] accents onstage.''

WANTING MIRANDA

Although their subjects may or may not be Hispanic, most of the Hispanic-American playwrights being produced at major regionals write their scripts in English. That's not surprising, since many were born in the United States or came here, as Cruz and Machado and Martínez did, as children.

Even so, says INTAR founder Max Ferrá, ``people like Nilo and Michael Garcés [co-artistic director of INTAR] write in English, but their whole essence is Hispanic.''

Yet when those writers venture outside the Latino box to create plays about what Cruz calls ''the other,'' they can encounter prejudicial roadblocks.

'[Producer] Elizabeth McCann called me once and said, `Look, Eduardo, they hear your name and want Carmen Miranda,' '' says Machado. ``I see it all as a big challenge. I call them on it. They feel they need to have you there, and some think you can write. But underneath is this huge wall.''

Luis Alfaro, winner of a MacArthur ''genius'' grant and codirector of the Taper's LTI, wrote a play for Chicago's Goodman Theatre called Straight as a Line. It's a British-style comedy, and when the Latino audience didn't get the play it was expecting, ''they were p---ed,'' Alfaro says.

Garcés, who has directed plays by Cruz, Machado and Santeiro at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, remembers an atypical early Cruz play about Italians in World War II, a play that went nowhere: ``Nilo couldn't catch a cold with that play.''

Summer Shorts playwright Ramirez, who grew up in Hialeah and whose play Pipo and Fufo: 1969 is about two Cuban men, is still a college student, one who has already learned a key lesson: 'When you make yourself the `other,' you exclude everyone else. I got over my otherness pretty quickly.''

Getting mainstream artistic directors to seek out Hispanic-American plays has been another hurdle, says Diane Rodriguez, codirector of the LTI and a third-generation Chicana.

'There's a growing Hispanic population, but it will take the younger artistic directors who understand and relate to a more diverse audience, who understand the quality of these plays to say, `Why not?' '' Rodriguez says. ``Our mission is to support the playwrights and bring Latino work into the canon.''

NURTURING

Alfaro says their work is about backing established writers while nurturing the new generation, as he was mentored by Fornes.

''I came out of Irene's workshop at INTAR, just like Nilo and so many of my contemporaries,'' says Alfaro, who has seen three Hispanic works -- Lisa Loomer's Living Out, Culture Clash's just-opened Chavez Ravine and his own Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner produced this season. ``I try to get writers to have a larger vision, to produce works that are political and social in some way, to write about things that speak to us today.''

Post-Pulitzer, Cruz's Anna in the Tropics is very likely winding up on Broadway next season, probably with a starry cast that may include Jimmy Smits (who has done two readings of the play), Salma Hayek and former Miamian Raúl Esparza. Its fortunes there, of course, are as unpredictable as the New York critics.

Even what the Pulitzer means, beyond historic recognition for a fine playwright and beautiful play, is up for debate.

''Whether Nilo's [Pulitzer] prize is a boost for other playwrights depends on whether their Latino theater is as good as Nilo's,'' says Buch of Repertorio. ``I don't believe in groups and in ghettoizing.''

Garcés simply poses questions: 'Is the fact that . . . Nilo won the Pulitzer emblematic of a real shift? Or does it just mean people can say, `Well, it happened.' ''