A new documentary is shining a light on the life and legacy of Raquel Welch, including how her Bolivian ethnicity impacted her iconic Hollywood career.
“I do think what’s really important to acknowledge is that Raquel Welch was originally Raquel Tejada,” Brian Eugenio, a cultural historian at Princeton University, says in the new CW documentary titled I am Raquel Welch.
The doc, which premiered on Saturday, March 8, alleges that Welch — who died in 2023 at the age of 82 — was told to essentially hide her ethnicity for the sake of her budding career in Hollywood.
“She was saying they wanted to change her hair, her look, her name,” Gregory Nava, a director who worked with Welch on American Family, says in the film. “Her manager at the time was saying, ‘No, you don’t want to come off as being Hispanic.’ They wanted to change her first name from Raquel to, I think, Debbie Welch. Very much in the Sandra Dee, Doris Day tradition, you know. But she refused.”
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Welch did, however, take the surname of her first husband, James Welch (the pair were married from 1959 to 1964) instead of Tejada, her father’s last name.
“Her father was a structural engineer who was a Bolivian immigrant to the United States who married an Anglo woman [Josephine Sarah Hall], and so, she was raised as fully aware that she was Bolivian,” Eugenio continues in the doc. “As she tells the story, her father refused to speak Spanish in the house ‘cause he didn’t want his kids to have an accent.”
In the film, Welch discusses her identity in her own words, saying that there was “a part of me that was missing” growing up. “The part of me that was missing was the part of me that my father chose to just amputate out of our lives,” she continued.
Audio of the late actress also features her admitting that she didn’t think she would have gone very far in Hollywood if she had insisted she be referred to by her maiden name.
“If you had kept your maiden name, do you think you would have been able to go as far in Hollywood?” an interviewer asks Welch in the audio. “If I was Raquel Tejado, not a chance in hell, no. No way,” Welch responds.
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Actress Constance Marie, who costarred with Welch in the early aughts PBS series American Family, explained in the film that Welch and many other Latina actresses “came up in a time where if you had any Spanish or any accent, you failed in school.”
“When they knew that you were part Latino, then you were stereotyped, put into this tiny box that Hollywood thought, ‘That’s what Latinos are,’ but Raquel was so much bigger than that,” she explained. “And she wanted to be bigger than that. So from that standpoint, she had to lead with whatever she could.”
“I started using the term ‘stealth Latino’ to talk about figures like Raquel Welch, a person of Latin American or Spanish descent,” Eugenio explained in the documentary. “Their Latino heritage was never necessarily a secret, but wasn’t necessarily part of their forward-facing brand.”
