Today Orlando is a cauldron of all the communal characteristics Disney sought to control. In its Parramore district, you can stock up on crack, meth, and angel dust. According to the Morgan Quitno research firm, in 2006 it joined such cities as Detroit and St. Louis to become one of the 25 most dangerous cities in America. The result is armed guards at the gates of "communities" where entry is solely by invitation. The Orlando area also has one of the highest pedestrian death rates among the largest metro regions in the country. Four decades after Disney's fateful flyover, Orlando is a place of enormous vitality, diversity, ugliness, discord, inventiveness, possibility, and disappointed hopes, where no clown in a character costume can tell people how to live, let alone where to park.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 2, 2005, thousands in Orlando got a shock when they turned on their car radios for the drive home. The Supremes had been banished; Kenny Rogers had been given the boot. Without warning or explanation, FM 100.3, Orlando's famous "golden oldies" station (known as the Big 100s), had vanished. Rumba 100.3, new home of central Florida's hottest Latin sounds, had taken its place. To oldies fans, it was as though Hispanics with boomboxes had somehow gotten inside the car.

The incident provides a defining parable of Orlando today. Twenty-five years ago, Orlando seemed a safe haven to those seeking to avoid the immigrants pouring into Miami and reshaping life all over the country. "Will the last American to leave please bring the flag?" the saying went. But as the sudden death of the Big 100s demonstrated, Miami was a forecast, not an aberration. Today there are about 400,000 Hispanics in the Orlando area—20 percent of its entire population.

The unannounced intrusion of Rumba 100.3 indicates something more than Orlando's expanding ethnic diversity. A generation ago, Walt Disney's secret decision transformed Orlando's destiny without anybody being asked whether they wanted it or not. Now another secret decision, this time by faraway executives at Clear Channel Communications, the giant radio conglomerate, had determined what kind of music people in Orlando would hear. The growth of Orlando's Hispanic population itself was touched off by a marketing decision. Back in the 1990s, when a real estate company was having trouble selling property in a development called Buenaventura Lakes, their marketing department decided to advertise in Spanish in the major newspapers in Puerto Rico. Suddenly Puerto Ricans were flowing into the Orlando area—creating an alternative to predominantly Cuban Miami for Hispanics in Florida.

Today Orlando is as multicultural as New York, and as much in the throes of globalization as any import-export center. Its growth has brought people speaking more than 70 languages to central Florida. Kissimmee, south of Orlando and just east of Disney World, has gone from being a cowboy town to mostly Hispanic in less than ten years. The tentacles of diversity have penetrated Disney World too. Few tourists realize it, but when their kids hug Goofy and Minnie they might be embracing low-wage workers from places like Sri Lanka and the Dominican Republic.