Forgotten Latina Bombshells: Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch

Original Posting, January 18. 2008 | UPDATED March 27, 2021

There were a lot of sins committed in the production of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in Amerca--sins of omission! One of the biggest screwups of the first edition (2007, UTPress) is leaving out a discussion Raquel Welch, San Diego State alum and former La Jollan, who, for some, made the late 20th century worth living. The wikipedia bio on Welch, né Jo Raquel Tejada, is Mormon-like in its details:

Welch, oldest of three children, was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Josepha Sarah (née Hall) and Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo.[1] Her father, who immigrated from La Paz, Bolivia, was an aerospace engineer of Spanish-Castilian descent[2]; her mother was an Irish-American.[3] Welch is a relative of the only female president of Bolivia,
original posting: 11/25/09
repost: September 21, 2011

Lydia Gueiler Tejada.[citation needed] In 1942, Armando Tejada was transferred to San Diego, California. The family moved to the suburb of La Jolla, where Welch grew up. She took dancing lessons as a child, and was winning beauty pageants by the time she was a teenager. Among her titles were "Miss Photogenic," "Miss La Jolla," "Miss Contour," and "Miss San Diego." In 1957, she was named "Miss Fairest of the Fair" at the San Diego County Fair. After attending La Jolla High School, she entered San Diego State College on a theater arts scholarship. The following year she married a high school sweetheart, James Welch.

Welch became synonymous with televised and cinematic sexuality about the time my voice began to change and hair started sprouting on my upper lip--so needless to say she plays a role in my development. But she also plays a dynamic role in the evolution of the Latina bombshell, injecting a Vietnam era openness and power that changed the trope forever. More on this soon.

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Here is a boingboing.net find of Welch in a groovy dance sequence from a 1970s television special, "Raquel Welch." According the Welchi/cinephile who posted it on YouTube, Ms. Tejada's in Mexico, dancing in front of the "Ruta de la Amistad public sculpture project at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City."




Mireya Navarro's 2002 NY Times piece on Tejada/Welch covers most of the angles on this tale in the back history of the uncloseting of Latinas in Hollywood:

June 11, 2002
Raquel Welch Is Reinvented As a Latina; A Familiar Actress Now Boasts Her Heritage

By MIREYA NAVARRO
On ''American Family,'' the PBS television series about a Mexican-American family in East Los Angeles, now in its first season, Aunt Dora is the drama queen of the family, a passionate, romantic woman who might have become a Hollywood star had she vigorously pursued her acting career. The actress playing Aunt Dora is Raquel Welch, who infuses the role with her familiar sultriness and smoky voice.

Nevertheless the sight of Ms. Welch in that role might bewilder some fans who remember her best for films like ''Fantastic Voyage,'' ''One Million Years B.C.,'' ''Kansas City Bomber'' and ''The Four Musketeers,'' as ''Woman of the Year'' on Broadway and in nightclub acts in Las Vegas. Dora, you see, is a Latina, a title Ms. Welch herself is claiming for the first time after nearly 40 years in show business.

''I'm happy to acknowledge it and it's long overdue and it's very welcome,'' she said in a recent interview at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. ''There's been kind of an empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time.''

Jo-Raquel Tejada, born in Chicago of a Bolivian father and an American mother, is taking to her heritage with gusto. Not only is she playing Dora as well as the film role of Hortensia in the 2001 romantic farce ''Tortilla Soup,'' she is also strutting her ethnicity in events like the American Latino Media Arts Awards and other public appearances.

''Latinos are here to stay,'' she told her audience at a National Press Club luncheon last month. ''As citizen Raquel, I'm proud to be Latina.''

As both citizen Raquel and Raquel Welch, sex symbol and pinup girl, Ms. Welch has bridged two eras. She has worked in the Hollywood that made her a blonde and tried to take away her first name as well as in the Hollywood that now considers Latinos hip and pays Jennifer Lopez up to $12 million a picture.

Ms. Welch grew up with a father who tried to assimilate at all costs, even banning Spanish at home. But now, at 61, she is riding the wave of new Latino generations that flaunt their ethnic pride and behave with the confidence of a major demographic force. [more]

Lastly, Raquel Welch also, like Rita Hayworth, (see OldSchool Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog entry for January 17, 2007) has a gnarly and gnarled connection with hair!

update, 11/25/09

Here's Raquel in her screen debut, Robert Sparr's A Swingin' Summer (1965)

Demi Lovato, Mexican-American, Latina Celebrity, Nude, in Vanity Fair Magazine or "Who says Latinas/os in Hollywood don't get enough exposure?"

Some of the images are striking, star Demi Lovato fierce, sans makeup...

...others are provocative, still strong, but also very 21st century edgy, "meta"

...the whole premise of the shoot is Lovato's rawness, strength, spontaneity, but there is something else working there as well, the reincarnation of a trope documented throughout Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America. There, illustrated ad nauseum, is revealed the birth of the sexualized, cinematic "Mexican"--an organism whose sexuality comes before the psyche, in fact, a sexuality that is always already writ large, in the genes and on the forehead.

Patrick Ecclesine's photographic collaboration with Lovato reveals a star in metamorphosis and while we cannot look away (nor should we), we should also understand the dynamics of that glance.

See the backstory, with video, here.

Mexy Excitement (and Latina/o Hijinks) Your Way Cometh, Adrian College, Michigan, and the Midwest!!!!! The MEXTASY Exhibition September 2013

Streaming video updates below | August 25, 2013

The rumors I started are true--nurturing my wanderlusting Tejano fetish for the American Midwest (where even Cleveland or Columbus shimmer on the horizon of my consciousness like Reykjavic or Paris do for others), I have set my sights again on Michigan (sorry Ann Arbor, no Wolverine desmadres this time) and the balmy climes of Adrian at a college there called, you guessed it, Adrian College. Located near the financially infamous (of late) Motor City of Detroit, Adrian is known for fences. That's right! Fences--and whilst this gives your border-rat textmex blogger some pause (especially with the all the neo-fascist fervor for border walls these days), I am going to hold my tongue for the moment as the fine liberal arts college is also know for something much more important--social justice.

Here's wikipedia on Adrian: "In the late 19th century through early 20th century Adrian was known as the 'fence capital of the world,' when J. Wallace Page invented the first successful wire fence. Throughout this period, Adrian was one of the first fencing manufacturers in the world and its fences were shipped as far as New York, Berlin, Asia, and Africa." Working in Adrian's favor is the denouement of this microhistory where J. Wallace Page's company  sponsors "the highly successful Page Fence Giants Black baseball team." But Adrian is also known for Adrian College, according to USA TODAY, the "#1 Up-and-Coming College in the Midwest" and I am thrilled to bring my Tejano/Califas-drenched exhibition and lectures to Adrian's shores! The other great thing about Adrian College? It's a thriving abolitionist-era institution of higher ed!

So how will it go down? Adrian College's Shipman Library has installed the full Mextasy exhibit (Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious) in its Heritage Room on the main Adrian College campus. The exhibition will be housed there from August 26 to September 13, 2013. Students and the community can see the exhibit anytime the library is open with Shipman Library regular hours running Monday through Thursday, 8am-1pm; Friday, 8am-5pm; Saturdays, 10am-5pm; and Sundays from 12pm-11pm.

more below the posterlink 

Get your own signed, numbered poster print here at the Mextasy semiotic shack!

There will be two major media-rich presentations associated with the Mextasy extravaganza. There will be a community lecture entitled  "Compulsively Desirable, Utterly Loathsome: Mexican and Latina/o Bodies in the 21st Century" on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, in Jones 110, 7:00pm–8:00pm. And there will be a campus lecture as well Thursday, September 12, 2013, entitled "Disrupting the Optical Hegemony of Stereotypes Now: Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene, and the Visual Dynamics of a Technosexual Tomorrow" in a room to be announced, 12:00pm–1pm.  A big gracias goes out to the Mextasy event sponsors: The Office of the Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs, Modern Languages and Cultures, Collegium II, ALPHA/Fin-Com, Institute for Ethics, Student Life, Multicultural Programs, Department of English, and the Institute for Creativity. 

An even bigger thank you and abrazo goes out to Professor Aïda Valenzuela, without whose imagination, vision, and drive, this event would never have happened!

EXTRAS

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a video and a cartoon for the Adrian College Lectures!

1. Humphrey Bogart and Alfonso Bedoya light up the screen in a scene from TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRES

2. Classic SPEEDY GONZALES antics from CANNERY WOE

 

click image for the streaming page

last promo posters--as with most images here, click to enlarge

Shocking Revelations Regarding Latina/o Targeted Media! They dig güeros/güeras even MORE than yankOUTLETS

Black and Brown Gettin' Down: Forest Whitaker's OUR FAMILY WEDDING

Latinas/os In and OUT of the American Eye

Mexicans in American Cinema as Craven Synechdoches for Sexuality in General and Sex in Particular

Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America has "seductive" in the title in order to play up one of its major theses--that Mexicans, and Latinas/os in general, have, in the 20th and 21st century, evolved into a movie shorthand, aka, a trope, for the sexual. Amazon.com has this great feature where you can upload and tag your own images and I have taken advantage of this to make the thesis above more clear in living color (and, perhaps, to move a couple more books off the shelf)--click the image above and roll over the images to find the embedded commentary.

In any event, here's a scene of Salma Hayek, from the Tonight Show, that makes the sexual/Mexican trope proposition even more clear:



nota bene: this clip has been featured earlier on the galleryblog, here; it appears here again with a slightly different commentary. deja vu city!

Melatonin Debate at Guanabee

Of War and "War": 'Low Rider' and Black/Mexican Tensions

The Memín Pinguin blow-up shows that African American and Latino community tensions are on the rise nationally--all the more reason to remember this Raza anthem and the band, ironically called "War," that made it possible:

Eva Mendes, Ethnic Studies Critic, on Rita Hayworth and More...

It's bad news when Latina starlets horn in on an Ethnic Studies turf--profe's gonna lose! In any event, as a fair amount of Tex[t]-Mex dwells on the figuration of Latinas/os in Hollywood, an excerpt from Eva Mendes's conversation, forthcoming from Interview magazine but available in part now from the Huffington Post, seems in order:

DC: I have a question for you that's a little more complicated. Do you find it a challenge being Latin in Hollywood?

EM: I would never call it a challenge. I think being a woman in Hollywood is a big enough challenge. It really is, man. I don't want to be one of those people who complain. But the lack of roles out there--it's unbelievable. I read a lot of scripts. I believe you've got to read one that you know you're not going to do, because you've got to educate yourself on what's out there to make the best decision for you. So it's challenging being a woman. Then there are other kinds of obstacles that come your way, but there are many times that being Latin has actually helped me, being a Cuban-American has helped me.


DC: I think it makes you seem very modern and real.


EM: Absolutely. Because whether you like this next statement or not, we are the future. I mean, we're all just mixing together that much more. We are the future in that sense. I don't mean Latinos, I just mean ethnic diversity. I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds. What makes it frustrating is when a director or a studio head doesn't see me for the same part that they'll see, let's say, Drew Barrymore for. Drew's a great friend of mine. But it's like, "No, we want more of an American type of girl." And it's like, American has opened up. I'm an American girl, born and raised. I mean, I was into New Kids on the Block, just like Drew! Actually, I shouldn't say that. I don't know if she was. I'm going to text her on that one.



DC: I was reading recently about Rita Hayworth.


EM: Oh! Love her film Gilda [1946].


DC: She was half-Latin, and she changed her name to her mother's maiden name. Her mother actually was Irish-American, and her last name was Hayworth. She also plucked her hairline so she would look more aristocratic. A lot has changed in 60 years. Back then, I don't think anybody was really ready for somebody with a Latin last name. Obviously, so much has changed. I was wondering if you feel, like, "Yeah, it's changed, but it hasn't."


EM: No, I feel it's definitely changed. Thank God. We are moving forward. Every time there's another successful Latin actress, that's just better for everyone involved. Now, I want to see more Asian girls. People ask me if it's difficult being Cuban-American in this industry. I say, "You know what? Not as difficult as it is being an Asian girl." We have so many Asian girls in this country, and they're so not represented up on the screen.

The Huffington Post, source.