This paper describes the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last 40 years, and suggests changes needed in order to accommodate the greater linguistic heterogeneity of the city. In the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s, traditional bilingual education programs were the best way to educate language minority children. But in the twenty-first century, with the demographic shifts and the technological advances of a globalized world, other understandings of bilingualism in education are needed. The paper ends by suggesting ways in which traditional bilingual education may exist alongside other more dynamic approaches of bilingualism in education that consider the city's growing linguistic heterogeneity, thus constructing a future from the past. (Contains 2 figures, 4 tables, and 6 notes.)