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.

{colorized}

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)

Prehistoric Chicana Doings! One Million Years B.C. with Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch

updated january 16, 2015; originally published 1/27/12, 8:16 PM Pacific Standard Time

and a screengrab for the Mextasy exhibition:

Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch, SDSU's Most Famous Almost-Alum

It will come as no surprise that some of the most popular postings on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog belong to the one and only Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch. The queen of the Latina bombshells in the 60s and 70s, Welch was an epic superstar--a performer who followed in the footsteps of actresses like Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) and who presaged the likes of Sofia Vergara. All of this a long way of setting up a new picture of the Latina bombshell I recently ran across and will be featuring someway somehow in the Richland College Mextasy show next month in Dallas, Texas.

Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch, Immortalized at the SDSU Faculty Staff Lounge!

Readers of the Textmex Galleryblog know that we have devoted a fair amount of web-space to the pre-eminent Latina bombshell in American pop culture, Raquel Welch--go here for a roundup of postings.

But before Welch turned heads back in the day she was one of the most famous alums (though she did not graduate) of SDSU--back then she was Jo Raquel Tejada, or Tajeda (sic), as the SDSU Faculty Staff Club didactic has it, pictured here with Melvin Anderson, who seems to be biting himself in this snapshot!

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Thanks to photographer Michael Borgstrom for the camera shots!

New Prints Now Available at the Mextasy Tictail Poster Shoppe! Yolanda Varela, Raquel Welch, and Salvador Dali!!!!

Go here, Yolanda Varela, and here, Salvador Dali and Raquel Welch, for the full skinny!  More info on the Richland College/Dallas, Texas, Mextasy show coming soon!

Jo Raquel Tejada, aka RAQUEL WELCH | New Mextasy Print

Raquel Welch, INTERVIEW: One Million B. C.

San Diego State University alum* Raquel Welch (née Jo Raquel Tejada), star of One Million Years B.C., and a regular on the Textmex Galleryblog appears here on the right. I love the way Wikipedia chronicles her memorable film work: "One Million Years B.C. is a 1966 British adventure/fantasy film in DeLuxe Color starring Raquel Welch and John Richardson, set in a fictional age of cavemen and dinosaurs. The film was made by Hammer Film Productions, and was a remake of the 1940 Hollywood film One Million B.C.. It recreates many of the scenes of that film (such as one in which an allosaurus attacks a tree full of children). It was marketed with the taglines "Travel back through time and space to the edge of man's beginnings...discover a savage world whose only law was lust!" and "This is the way it was". Location scenes were filmed on the Canary Islands in the middle of winter, in late 1965. The film was released in the United States in 1967.[2] ¶Like the original film, this remake is largely ahistorical. It portrays dinosaurs and humans living together, whereas, according to the geologic time scale, the last dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years BC, and Homo sapiens (modern humans) did not exist until about 200,000 years BC. Ray Harryhausen, who animated all of the dinosaur attacks using his famous stop motion technique, has stated that he did not make One Million Years B.C. for "professors" who in his opinion "probably don't go to see these kinds of movies anyway" (this was a comment he made for the DVD of the 1933 version of King Kong)."

Here's an interview with Welch on her work on the movie:

  *She never graduated, but who is counting?

Raquel Welch via DANIEL HERNANDEZ...! Wow!

here's the streaming video for those to fatigued to click thru to Daniel Hernandez's awesome blog:

Jo Raquel Tejada (aka Raquel Welch) and the {LATINA} Body Politic

Tex[t]-Mex argues that Latinas and Latinos are always already sexual, the provocation to libidinal tumescence implicit in our DNA; click the image above to enter a pretty cool collection of Time Magazine covers with backstories as to the response they had on the newsweekly's readership.

Black and Brown: The African-American, "Mexican"/Latina|o Mix

Me and Gustavo Arellano are screening an ambitious schlock Hollywood classic, 100 Rifles, this coming Monday at the Tin Can Alehouse in San Diego--hit the image opposite or this link for the details. 

The film caused scandal when it appeared owing to an erotic scene between Raquel Welch and Jim Brown--no doubt this "scandal" was hyped by the publicity hacks at Marvin Schwarz Productions along with 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor. But the appearance of this scene and the attendant uproar it ostensibly spurred or spermed, pardon the pun, does give us the chance to re-screen the film with a prepared cultural studies lens, to understand the narrative that unfolds in a way that sensitizes us to African American and Latina/o relations. 

 The next time you hear someone rant about tension between ethnic bodies or worry about changing demographics in the Southern California and beyond, remember that the answer to all these problems is a little bit of understanding and whole lotta love. End of sermon.  Here's some shots I have grabbed from across the internets of/from 100 Rifles:

 

What Hollywood Teaches us About Prehistoric "Mexicans"! They Fight like Demons, but Fair | Raquel Welch