LOS ANGELES (AP) – Jo-Raquel Tejada remembers one of the first times that she had to take a stand for her identity.
She came home from school one day, tired of being called Jo. She didn’t like that name and felt more comfortable with Raquel. The next day, the girl’s white mother, Josephine, who had named her Jo after herself, went to the school and asked that her daughter’s name be changed to simply Raquel.
Unknowingly, the girl had won a key battle about her Hispanic heritage, an issue she largely ignored after taking her first husband’s last name and becoming a sex symbol known as Raquel Welch.
Even though she doesn’t speak much Spanish, the 74-year-old actress says now that her Latino background is indeed part of who she is.
“I think language is very important to your identity and not having that … I sometimes feel isolated from that part of me,” said Welch in a recent interview. “Yet I still feel very, very Hispanic. The essence of who I am is a Latina.”