Raquel Welch Was Told to Change Her First Name So She Wouldn’t ‘Come Off as Being Hispanic’

Raquel Welch Was Told to Change Her First Name So She Wouldn’t ‘Come Off as Being Hispanic’

Jeremy Helligar

March 8, 2025 at 3:05 PM

Before there was Selena Quintanilla, Jennifer Lopez and Emilia Pérez stars Zoë Saldaña and Selena Gomez, there was Raquel Welch, For a brief period in the 1960s, Welch was one of the biggest stars on the planet.

And she just happened to be Hispanic, the daughter of Armando Carlos Tejado, who was born in Bolivia. Would “Jo Raquel Tejado” (Welch’s original name) ever have become as big a star as “Raquel Welch” became when she launched into the stratosphere with her leading role in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C.?

Would Debbie Welch have been even bigger?

Neither Hollywood nor the legendary actress’s father thought Jo Raquel Tejado — or even Raquel Welch — had much of a shot. The new CW documentary I am Raquel Welch, which premieres on March 8, explores the Latino heritage of the superstar who died in 2023 at age 82 and its ramifications on her life and 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 documentary. “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. 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.”

Related: Raquel Welch Died of Cardiac Arrest and Had Alzheimer’s Disease Leading Up to Her Death

In an audio recording heard in the documentary, Welch, who was born in Chicago and raised in California, talks about the effect her dad’s erasure of her Bolivian side had on her. “There was a part of me that was missing,” she says. “The part of me that was missing was the part of me that my father chose to just amputate out of our lives.”

The figurative amputation was, to a certain degree, a necessity back then if you were a female performer of Latin heritage looking to ascend the A-list in Hollywood. Rita Hayworth, whose father was Spanish, had to do it. Rita Moreno refused to play the game, and she didn’t work for seven years after winning an Oscar for the 1961 classic West Side Story.

Constance Marie, who costarred with Welch in the 2002-2004 PBS series American Family, says whitewashing one’s identity was encouraged in an era where deeply entrenched racism was still out in the open. “Raquel came up in a time where if you had any Spanish or any accent, you failed in school,” she says in the documentary.

“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,” Marie adds. “And she wanted to be bigger than that. So from that standpoint, she had to lead with whatever she could.”

Nina Colman, creator of the 2017 TV sitcom Date My Dad, in which Welch costarred, says in the documentary that her friend was aware of the uphill climb she faced as an actress with a Bolivian father. “Well, the story she told me about being Latina as she was coming up was not that it was hidden, but it wasn’t something she brought to the forefront,” Colman explains.

Today female performers who embrace it as part of their brand may still face some hurdles. But in the post — blonde-bombshell era of the mid ’60s, with few exceptions (Sophia Loren, for one), even a hint of exoticism could have meant the difference between being an occasionally working actress and a major star.

“I started using the term ‘stealth Latino’ to talk about figures like Raquel Welch, a person of Latin American or Spanish descent,” Eugenio says. “Their Latino heritage was never necessarily a secret, but wasn’t necessarily part of their forward-facing brand.”

“A woman reporter comments on how when they first encountered Raquel Welch she had a greasy makeup look like a Tijuana waitress. And then she said, ‘They’ve done wonders. Her makeup looks great now.’” he adds.

Related: Raquel Welch’s Life in Photos

In an old audio clip played in the documentary, an interviewer asks Welch: “If you had kept your maiden name, do you think you would have been able to go as far in Hollywood?”

Welch replies: “If I was Raquel Tejado, not a chance in hell, no. No way.”

While Welch took the surname of her first husband, James Welch, to whom she was married from 1959 to 1964, she refused to get rid of Raquel — the Spanish variant of Rachel. Hollywood tried to persuade her, though, according to Gregory Nava, the film director who worked with Welch on American Family.

“She was saying they wanted to change her hair, her look, her name,” he says. “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. [Laughs] Very much in the Sandra Dee, Doris Day tradition, you know. But she refused.”

I am Raquel Welch premiers March 8 on the CW and streams after on the CW website.

Read the original article on People