I don't care when White or Black people play the role of a Latino in a film. Many people who are Latino can be considered either but usually prefer to be seen as "mixed ethnically". In other words just call me Cuban or Puerto Rican etc not Black or White.

But I hate when the Geraldo Rivera's of Hollywood and others like him make money exploiting Latino sir names. Geraldo you are not Latino just cause you speak a little Spanish. I remember that you changed your name from Jerry Rivers, you saw your self as Jewish until you decided it was beneficial to be Latino for your opportunity. I hate the fact that he sometimes masquerades as both a Latino and a Journalist. When he was doing a report on Gary Conduit he asked "thoughtful and probing questions" (sarcasm) Geraldo questions are sure to help find Chandra Levy: "Was he a rough sex kind of guy?" - "What about his sexual style?" - "How Many girls?" - "You can give me first names". To his credit, Flammini shied away from answering these questions, saying that it didn't really matter. I also hate the fact that he is still being rewarded for being an O.J. Simpson stalker. Anyway back to the point I was making, which was that most Latino actors get mad when a African- American gets a Latino role over them but are hush when a white person gets the role. Remember the controversy when the Dominican character "People's Hernandez" in the Shaft movie was played by Jeffrey Wright. But I do get offended when people who have legitimate claim to be Latino wake up over night and want to shout it out, when they told the world they were white before.

On American Family, the PBS television series about a Mexican-American family in East Los Angeles, Aunt Dora is the drama queen of the family, a woman who might have become a Hollywood star had she vigorously pursued her acting career. The actress playing Aunt Dora is Raquel Welch. SAY WHAT, YEP 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". Oh so I guess YOU want the LATINO acting roles now.

Jo-Raquel Tejada, born in Chicago of a Bolivian father & 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 she let 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 sellout father who tried to assimilate at all costs, even banning Spanish at home. But now, at 61, she is broke (not dead broke) and riding the wave of new Latino generations that flaunt their ethnic pride and behave with the confidence of a major demographic force. These days Ms. Welch is learning Spanish from tapes, planning her first trip to Bolivia in August to meet relatives and working on her own Latino film project. After fifty-some movies and worldwide celebrity, she is embracing the identity she said she had accepted to reject to become a star.

“It was told to me that if I wanted to be typecast, I would play into that”, she said, by emphasizing her Hispanic background. “You just couldn't be too different. My first big breakthrough part in `One Million Years B.C.' they died my hair blond. It's a marketing thing. And now I'm sure there are a lot of people who are marketing specialists just for the Latino community. They want those 35 million people to buy their products and to vote for them”.

“SO NOW WER'E able to be ethnically present to the Latino audience but ethnically invisible to a majority audience”, Mr. Sanchez said. “That's the comfort level of film and television today. We need to move it beyond that to where our culture and identity are fully integrated in a character”.

But others argued that for every Martin Sheen or Cameron Diaz, actors of Spanish and Latin descent who usually portray non-Latin characters, there is an Esai Morales or Andy Garcia, who play Latino characters or alternate ethnic roles.

“We can have Latino actors play Latinos or no n-Latinos - it doesn't matter”, said Luis Reyes, co-author of Hispanics in Hollywood: A Celebration of 100 Years in Film and Television (Lone Eagle, 2000). “We just need a diversity of images. If you have diversity, at least the negative images don't bother you because that's not all you see”.

Some portrayals were so offensive that in the 1920's Mexico and other Latin American countries called for a boycott of American films. But there were also periods when Latinos were popular - the Latin lover craze, the Carmen Miranda comedies - particularly in World War II when much of Europe was closed off as a market and movies turned to Latin America instead.

For many Latino actors, success depended on fitting the all-American mold. There was Rita Hayworth, the sex symbol of the 1940's who in real life was Margarita Carmen Cansino, born to a Spanish father and an Irish mother. And there was Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca Quinn, born in Chihuahua, Mexico, of Mexican-Indian and Mexican-Irish parents, and better known as Anthony Quinn.

“He had to be somewhat Anglo or European in order not to be dismissed”, Ms. Welch said Quinn told her when they discussed the subject before his death last year. In her own case, Ms. Welch gave in on the hair but not on Raquel, her paternal grandmother's name. (Welch was her first husband's name.) “I thought, well, if I can't even have the Raquel, that's really selling out completely, that's really turning my back on everything that I really am”, she said.

She played a Latina in only two movies, a Mexican in Bandolero! and a Mexican Yaqui Indian in 100 Rifles, in which she is better remembered for her interracial or interethnic love scenes with Jim Brown. But all of Hollywood tauted it as the first Black and white love scene. Welch said she never hid her ethnic background, but it never became common knowledge. Instead, she wore a fur bikini and was typecast as a sex symbol. Yet she claimed that she didn't totally sell out cause she kept Raquel.

Ms. Welch said her family never visited Bolivia. And it was not until her 30's, when her grandmother came for a visit, that Ms. Welch finally met her namesake. Although she was rolling in loot at the time. “Those people who wanted to make it in the American system found it necessary and desirable to kind of suppress their Latino quality," she said of her father. "He never spoke any Spanish in the home, so as not to have us have an accent. We never were in a neighborhood where there were other Latinos around. I didn't know any Latin people”.

For a long time, she said, she resented her father for what she calls overkill. She said his effort to erase his ethnicity was "a lie, a lie that worked as far as blending in". But eventually she came to understand him. “In a way he didn't have a choice", she said. “There was a sense of shame on his part, of the confusion and the prejudice around against Latins”, Ms. Welch said. “So he suffered a great deal. I suffered some. My suffering is more of a kind of psychological feeling of not knowing who I am”.

When the time came to cast Dora for American Family, a character based on one of Mr. Nava's aunts, he needed an actress who was not only beautiful but also charismatic. Mr. Nava, 53, decided to take Ms. Welch out to dinner and ask her to play Dora.

“She said, it's too late for me to be Latina”, he recalled. “I said, it's never too late”. On the series, alongside actors like Edward James Olmos, Sonia Braga and Esai Morales, “she's totally believable,” Mr. Nava said. “Obviously, it's there”, he said of her Latina essence. Hollywood is lying to her again. Its too damn late to rep "el barrion".

Mr. Reyes, the writer, says Ms. Welch has nothing to lose by taking Latina roles. “She's 60 years old, and how many roles are there for60-year-old women?”, he said.

But while Ms. Welch, who can still wear tight jeans and a low cut T-shirt, may be finding new roles in her current incarnation, she said she had not been showered with offers. Despite signs of a more auspicious climate for Latinos in Hollywood, they are still largely absent from movies and prime-time television. “I do feel very fortunate now at this point in my career, where I'm definitely middle aged and I'm not getting the kind of young leading lady parts anymore, that I have discovered and have been gifted with this role on `American Family' where I can feed myself personally as a human being”, she said. On the set of this other American family, she said, “I feel completely like I belong”. - Yippie Kai Yai you're an industry whore.

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