As condolences and tributes poured in for Raquel Welch this week, some lauding her work have pointed out that it was not until nearly 40 years in the industry that she reclaimed her Latina identity, and then blazed a path for others to follow.
By the time she set her sights on Hollywood, Welch was a divorced mother of two, pursuing her career with her first husband’s surname. Even this compromise was initially not enough. When she signed with 20th Century Fox,“You just couldn’t be too different,” Welch said in her Times interview. She recalled that in her breakthrough role in “One Million Years B.C.,” her hair was dyed blond. “It’s a marketing thing.
If Welch did not actively promote her Latina identity when she first achieved fame, it’s largely because that was an unknown concept in the 1960s. Terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino”Brian Herrera, an associate professor at Princeton, describes Welch as “a stealth Latino.” “She was in a complicated space about it,” Herrera said of Welch’s ethnicity. “And she arrived in a transitional period of how Latinos are understood in U.S. culture.”
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Welch reclaimed her ethnic identity. “Latinos are here to stay,’’ she said at the National Press Club in 2002. “As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.’’
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