Abogados de Inmigracion

At home, growing up as Raquel Tejada in the affluent San Diego suburb of La Jolla, she confronted another, silent form of white-washing. Her Bolivian-born father, Armando, an engineer who fell in love with America’s promise of modernity, did not speak of his heritage or allow Spanish to be spoken at home.

After a 40-year career as an international sex symbol, a movie star in films ranging from The Three Musketeers to Legally Blonde and as a Broadway performer, Welch, now 62, paused a few years ago to piece together her true identity. She needed answers to help explain her father’s behavior.

Sitting at home, surrounded by family photographs, she spoke candidly about this journey into memory—and her real life trip last August to her father’s birthplace that helped her recover her buried Latin roots.

“I started to realize that I did not have a sense of who I really was. I only had part of the story and the part of the story that I had was that I was an American girl living most of my life in Southern California,” she says. “I had no Latin friends.”

Welch started writing down memory fragments of her early childhood. Her life story began in Chicago where she was born, the oldest of three children, from her father’s marriage to her Irish-American mother.

One of the first memories that came back to Welch was the confusion she felt as a child about how others responded to her name. “I was like 5 years old in kindergarten. I came back from school and I realized that people couldn’t pronounce my name, Raquel Tejada,” she says, rolling the R in Raquel. “So I would start to ask questions. ‘They can’t say my name. What kind of a name is it? Why is it so different?’ And I was not given answers.”

She believes the process of self examination has now led to a new turn in her career. Out of the blue, Academy Award-nominated director Gregory Nava (El Norte, Mi Familia and Selena) called to tap her for the role of Aunt Nora in his PBS series American Family, about a Mexican-American family in East Los Angeles.

Nava, who grew up in San Diego, remembered Welch as the Latina beauty pageant winner who in 1957 was named “Fairest of the Fair” at the San Diego County Fair and whose titles included “Miss Photogenic” and “Miss Contour.”

When he cast her in the series, alongside Edward James Olmos and Sonia Braga, it was only her third screen credit as a Latina. She played a Mexican part in the 1968 Bandolero and a Mexican Yaqui Indian in the 1969 film 100 Rifles.

In 2001, Welch was also cast as Hortensia in the film Tortilla Soup. “I have this belief that when you start thinking of things, and you start acting on the things that you are thinking about, it creates vibrations and these vibrations really do go out in the world and you get messages back,” Welch says. Although she did not think of herself as a Latina until just a few years ago, Welch says she was always aware of certain instincts.

“If you have Latin chromosomes, you have a certain sensitivity,” she says. “Like, I always liked flamenco music. And my father taught me to tango ... And I understood when I looked in the mirror that I was not Mary Jane Pringle. I was somebody different.”

Nonetheless, Welch grew up with a confusing jumble of information. As a toddler, her father would sit her down and make her memorize “big words” out of Time magazine. Yet, he prohibited her mother from showing her pictures of Indians. She eventually learned that she was named after her paternal grandmother, but Welch did not meet her namesake until she was in her 30s and her grandmother was very old.

As she spoke, her eyes at times looked out in the direction of the canyon outside her home. It bothered her, she says, that she was not raised with greater awareness—and pride—for her Hispanic heritage. “I know that Rita Hayworth was not brought up that way. I don’t think that Rita Moreno was brought up that way,” she says.

Charles Ramírez Berg, author of Latino Images in Film and a professor of radio, television and film at the University of Texas at Austin, said Welch’s professional and personal trajectory was a reflection of an earlier era.

“When I was growing up, my parents told me the same thing: ‘Speak English,’ ” says Ramírez Berg, whose mother is Mexican. “I think what that generation was basically saying is that we want to protect you from racism.”

When Welch began her career in the 1960s, the U.S. Latino population was just 2 percent. Today, when Jennifer López and Salma Hayek are household names, Latinos comprise 13.5 percent of the population.

Ramírez Berg says that it explains why Welch embraced Latino roles after she had already established her stardom, while the success of younger Hispanic movie stars and singers is measured by their ability to “crossover” and transcend their ethnicity.

“She had to become white because that is what Hollywood knew how to sell,” Ramírez Berg says. “Those of us who were Latinos knew that Raquel Welch was a Latina, and we got to enjoy her success all along.”

Welch says her identity quest came to a head after her mother’s death nearly two years ago at the age of 92. Together with her brother and sister, Welch says a
familiar topic of conversation came up—and took on new urgency.

“When we were reconnecting, we always came back to this theme about not having enough information and how angry we all were with my father,” Welch says. “There was a time in my life, I really have to say, that I thought I hated him. And the more that I thought about him, I tried to find reasons” to explain his actions.

She found sage advice in the words of Moctesuma Esparza, a film producer and friend. Esparza, who traces his roots to the Mechica Indians of Mexico, had traveled to Bolivia and he urged Welch to do the same.

“It was just a very natural thing for me. I knew that all Latinos were very connected to family and I knew that she would respond to this beautiful country and people and that she would integrate this into her identity,” Esparza says.

Welch says she was welcomed “like Evita” on the two week trip last August. She soon realized she needed to meet her relatives and the Bolivian people to help her get a better understanding of herself—and they needed her to reinforce their identity as well.

“They don’t have a lot of people from Bolivia who have a recognition in the world. I was carrying a lot of hopes and dreams with me. And they were identifying with me and gaining inspiration and courage and things from me when I didn’t even know about it,” she says. “So I felt very touched and I was all the time overly emotional while I was there.”
Welch kept busy on her trip, giving press conferences, delivering a speech in Spanish which she wrote and later memorized from a taped translation and attending a film festival in the city of Santa Cruz that showed a retrospective of her films. She also made time to bond with her cousins, aunts and uncles—and visited the La Paz home where her father grew up.

Staying up late one night talking with her cousin Georgina offered an important insight, helping her close the circle of her identity. Their upbringing, she says, had not been so different. And she recognized her father in Georgina’s father, Aldo.

The trip helped her see her father as a young man who moved to California at age 17, right before the outbreak of World War II. As part of his formula for success, he tried hard to make sure his children did not feel different from other kids.

“He fell in love with America, the idea of science, aeronautics, physics and the world he wanted to pursue. I think he looked around his country and around South America and he did not see what his calling was,” Welch says. “This was his dream. When he came here, he divorced his heritage. That was the way he did it.”

Like her father, Welch made great sacrifices for her lifelong dream to be an actress. As a child, she studied dance and ballet and was a good student. But she realized early, she says, that Hollywood did not care about her brains. A poster of her clad in a fur bikini to promote the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. launched her as an overnight sex symbol.

“When I got a really close look at movies, I realized that it wasn’t what I dreamed it was. I dreamed it was a very special place where you did all these artistic things. Well, in a way it is. But the real thing is that it is a business ... I would say there are a heavier degree of commercial decisions made than there are artistic decisions made.”
Welch is now at work helping to write and develop a feature film about a Latina—but she won’t say anymore about the project out of fear of jinxing it. She says her singular goal in life is to learn to speak Spanish more fluently.

“Now that I have been to La Paz, that is the most