By Fernando Mexia

Los Angeles, Sep 4 (EFE).– Jo Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940, and her Bolivian immigrant father did all he could to keep her unaware of her roots so she would fit in better with the dominant U.S. culture, though she wholeheartedly recovered her Latin heritage after becoming the stunning celeb Raquel Welch.

The actress and sex symbol of the 1960s and 1970s turns 75 this Saturday, proud of her origins that she tends to mention at whatever interview or event she finds herself, and where she is still known for a figure that has not given in to the passing of time.

Welch’s last name was Tejada until, at 19, she married James Westley Welch, her boyfriend at La Jolla High School in Southern California, where her family settled when she was a toddler who had scarcely learned to walk.

Her story, as included in the 1993 book “Notable Hispanic American Women,” seems to have been lifted from a Hollywood movie about teenagers. She was a cheerleader, class vice president and a member of the drama club.

She was just 15 when she won her first beauty contest, going on to be crowned Miss La Jolla and Miss San Diego. Idolized for her body beautiful, Welch pursued her dream of being an actress despite early rebuffs by casting agents.

Before getting a foot in the Hollywood door, the stunner worked as a waitress, a model, and as a weather forecaster on local TV in San Diego,

Until 1964 it looked like movieland would never give her a chance, but then she landed brief roles in “A House is Not a Home” and “Roustabout,” the latter with Elvis Presley.

That same year was her stepping stone, though it was looks and not talent that kicked off her career.

Twentieth Century Fox signed her for a superproduction, the sci-fi film “Fantastic Voyage,” in which she was a microscopic member of a crew that sailed a miniaturized submarine through the insides of a human being to cure a blood clot on his brain.

The role called for her to wear a form-fitting diving suit, and her curves were the star of the show.

“Fantastic Voyage” premiered in August 1966 and, in February 1967, she was Fox’s poster girl promoting “One Million Years B.C.,” an adventure flick shot in the Canary Islands in which she played a cavegirl threatened by volcanoes and giant dinosaurs.

For the length of that dialogue-free film, Welch was seen running for her life in an animal-skin bikini. From that moment, the actress was a Hollywood star and had leading roles in dozens of movies and was a magazine cover girl over 100 times.

Hollywood cast a scantily clad Welch in “The Biggest Bundle of Them All” (1968) and “Flareup” (1969), gave her a hot scene in “100 Rifles” (1969) and had her back in a bikini for “Myra Breckinridge” (1970), though that movie was precisely a spoof of film industry machismo.

In that work based on the novel of the same name by Gore Vidal, Welch played a sexy young transsexual bent on making big changes in Hollywood.

Through the rest of the 1970s, Welch starred in more than a dozen feature films, though with disappointing box-office results. Her top hit was “The Three Musketeers” (1973), which won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.

She tried her luck onstage and scored a hit with the musical “Woman of the Year” (1982).

Welch began appearing on television, and to the extent that she freed herself from film studios’ pressure to look like the perfect Caucasian, she turned more to being Latina.

In 2002 she debuted with Edward James Olmos in “American Family,” a TV series all about the Gonzalez family in which she played the aunt, and also appeared as Vina Navarro in “CSI: Miami” (2012).

Welch does not hide her frustration at not being bilingual like the new generations of Hispanics who live in close contact with their cultural heritage, something that in her youth looked more like a problem than an advantage. EFE