ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- As the lights dimmed and the performance of "Maria de Buenos Aires," a Spanish-language tango "operita" began, it took a few moments of disbelief before recognizing that this wasn't taking place in New York, Los Angeles, Miami or San Antonio -- the capitals of Hispanic culture in the United States.

Instead, it was happening in Albuquerque, "the city at the end of the world," as a book with that title once dubbed it. But the National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico -- which includes the new $22.8 million Roy E. Disney Center for the Performing Arts where "Maria" danced -- is helping put the city on the nation's tourist map.

With Albuquerque, founded by the Spanish in 1706, beginning a year of tricentennial celebrations, it would be a shame to miss the party. And the 5-year-old National Hispanic Cultural Center serves as a focal point for exploring the region's cultural landscape, offering creative accompaniment to the rush of chilies and cerveza that flows through this high-desert city like the Rio Grande.

Although the Disney Center, with its modernist Mayan exterior and gleaming copper and burnished-wood interior, is the cultural center's prized possession, it's not the sole attraction at this 51-acre celebration of Latino arts.

The art gallery, on the first floor of a building shaped like a pre-Columbian pyramid, has exhibited everything from the California homeboy aesthetic of Cheech Marin's collection to the religious traditionalism of sculptor Gustavo Victor Goler. The genealogy center and research library offer New Mexicans, as well as people in western Texas and eastern Arizona, a chance to explore their family roots and history.

Throw in Spanish-language classes, a cafe serving traditional New Mexican cuisine, a 40,000-square-foot fresco being created by artist Frederico Vigil and several acres of Rio Grande parkland that are open to the public, and it becomes clear that the cultural center doesn't just come alive at night for the occasional taste of tango.

Thanks to its programming as well as its eye-catching architecture -- a kaleidoscope of Meso-American history, classic Spanish grace, low-slung adobe New Mexican rusticism and Latin modernism -- the cultural center is attracting widespread attention.

After the opening of the Disney hall in September, Agustin Gurza of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Some say Albuquerque's cultural center, 20 years in the making, is the best-kept secret in the Latino arts world. . . . For Southern California's undernourished Latino cultural scene, New Mexico's success has served as a model -- and an embarrassment."

BALANCING ACT

Constructing the largest center of its kind in the United States (two more buildings should be finished before the end of the decade) was not on the minds of those who proposed it two decades ago. The artists who originally lobbied for a center imagined more of a community gathering place, an outlet for locals. But the vision -- and the funding from federal, state and private sources -- gradually grew to encompass all of the Hispanic world.

So today, Andrew Connors, a former curator of Latin art at the Smithsonian, is the cultural center's senior visual arts curator, helping oversee a striking collection of rotating and permanent exhibits, such as the current "Inspirados" ("Inspired Ones") where Goler, Mary Antonia Wood and Santiago Perez blend images of surrealism and folk art into contemporary commentary.

A TV studio is being built with dreams of producing local programming as well as something along the lines of Live From Lincoln Center.

"Tech sitios," or remote computer classrooms, have been set up in Trujillo, Spain (to which many northern New Mexicans trace their ancestry), and Espanola, N.M., north of Albuquerque. "What we're working on is sharing programming, sharing artists and connecting communities," says education director Shelle Luaces, who eventually wants to do videoconferencing with scholars and poets.

All of this puts the cultural center squarely on the pointy horns of a cultural problem: balancing New Mexican regionalism with pan-Hispanic globalism. After all, what does a tango operita from several thousand miles away have to do with the working-class Hispanic neighborhood outside the cultural center's windows?

It didn't help that, to build the center, families had to be displaced, and one resident -- the late Adela Martinez -- refused to move. The cultural center was redesigned to accommodate her family; the two small houses between the parking lot and the main entrance are readily visible to visitors.

"It came to a point where the families said, 'You're telling us what you're trying to do is preserve, protect and promote Hispanic culture, and you're going to do that by disenfranchising the very people who embody that,' " recalls acting executive director Gene Henley. "The two lessons I learned from that is to remember the whole history and remember what we're all about."