The Life and Legacy of Latina Actress Raquel Welch

The legendary actress Raquel Welch passed away in February at the age of 82 after a brief illness. But her legacy will forever live in the hearts of her followers and the 30 movies and 50 TV series that this beautiful woman, known as “El Cuerpo” (The Body), made. 

Was Raquel Welch Latina?

Raquel was of Latino origin indeed. Her father, the aeronautical engineer Armando Carlos Tejada, was Bolivian. Raquel Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5th, 1940, in the city of Chicago, Illinois.  Her mother was a British woman named Josephine Sarah Hall. 

The Latino roots of Raquel Welch

 The woman known for wearing “mankind’s first bikini,” despite the fact the she spoke little Spanish, Raquel felt deeply connected with her Latino essence.

Her father was born in La Paz, Bolivia, and emigrated to the United States to study at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, and they had Raquel. However, Armando refused to transmit his culture and roots to his children, fearing they would suffer prejudice and have fewer opportunities in the future if they developed a Hispanic accent. Therefore, he decided he would not speak any Spanish at home nor talk about his roots.

“He wanted to spare us some of the difficulties and, in his opinion, the prejudice against people who speak with an accent. I really wished he had spoken Spanish at home so I could have had it as a second language,” revealed Raquel Welch in an interview with the Associated Press.

Her life story was precisely linked to the career that she later chose. “I think one of the reasons I ended up being an actress was because I didn’t know who I was. It was easier to get out of reality and play acting, pretend and get into other identities than to deal with reality, because I really did not know anything about my roots for many years,” she recounted in another moment. 

“I think language is very important to your identity and not having that. I sometimes feel isolated from that part of me. Yet I still feel very, very Hispanic. The essence of who I am is a Latina. I think if you have an Anglo-Saxon background and you are of Latino descent, the Latin side wins out. It’s something about your temperament and your essence,” stated Raquel. “I felt that I was more sensual than a lot of the young girls that I went to school with. I didn’t think it was anything special but I could see that I did have these things in my chromosomes, so I was feeling very much my father’s daughter,” she also concluded in different opportunities. 

Raquel, the Sex Symbol Woman

Raquel Welch was a sex symbol in the 1960s and 1970s in both Hollywood and international cinema. Before becoming an actress, she won several beauty contests in San Diego, California. She also worked as an underwear and swimsuit model, posing on the covers of major US magazines. From there, she began to work in popular tv series such as “The Virginian” and “Bewitched.”

She married for the first time at the age of 18 to James Welch and used his last name until her death.” They had two children, but in 1964 they divorced. It was during that decade the actress made her film debut at the hands of her manager Patrick Curtis, who she married in 1967. Her third marriage was to Andre Weinfeld in 1980, and her fourth to Richard Palmer in 1990, who she separated from in 2011.

Her first appearance on the silver screen was in the movie “Roustabout,” starring Elvis Presley.  However, it was two other films that made her an international star: Richard Fleischer’s “Fantastic Voyage” (1966) and  “One Million Years BC” (1966), directed by Don Chaffey, in which she famously wore the deerskin bikini that would consecrate her as “The Body” of Hollywood.

She worked with Marcello Mastroianni in “Shoot Loud, Louder…I Don’t Understand” (1966), directed by Eduardo De Filippo. Then she appeared in Stanley Donen’s “Bedazzled” (1967), Leslie H. Martinson’s “Fathom” (1967), Andrew V. McLaglen’s “Bandolero!” (1968), “Lady in Cement” (1968) by Gordon Douglas, “100 Rifles” (1969) by Tom Gries, and “The Magic Christian” (1969) by Joseph McGrath. Her talent for comedy was evident in “The Three Muskateers,” in which she earned a Golden Globe. She would also appear in countless television shows. 

She would charge up to a million dollars in the 1960s for her contracts, investing the money in her own production company. In 1986, she was compensated with 11 million dollars by Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, according to the verdict of a Los Angeles jury, for having been excluded from the cast of the film Cannery Row in 1980.

While Raquel Welch’s legacy will always live on through her big screen and television performances and for being one of the biggest sex symbols of the 1960s, she will also be fondly remembered in the Latino community, of which she was a proud member.