Robert Beltran

Before we get into Robert Beltran, let’s take a minute to talk about Jamake Highwater. (This will be slightly less aggravating than the next person we’ll have to discuss, I guess.) Jamake Highwater, born Jackie Marks, was a writer of Eastern European Jewish ancestry. Exactly what his ancestral claims were vary by telling, but the short version is that he was like Iron Eyes Cody. You know, lying and claiming Native American heritage that he did not in so many words have. Highwater had been exposed as a fraud by 1984. In 1993, the producers of Star Trek: Voyager selected him to flesh out the background of Chakotay. Which, you know, that explains a lot except why he was selected.

Beltran, meanwhile, is of Mexican-Native American descent. He calls himself “Latindio.” He is the seventh of ten children; one of his seven brothers is jazz musician Louie Cruz Beltran. He grew up in the Central Valley of California, spending his childhood in Bakersfield and going to college in Fresno. After graduating, he moved to college, where he first appeared as one of the many minor performers in Zoot Suit, which—if you know your LA history—clearly needed a lot of people of a certain ethnicity to fill out the background.

His next role, which I have actually seen, was as the eponymous Raoul in Eating Raoul. (It’s always kind of annoyed me, actually, as that’s the French spelling. It should be Eating Raul.) It is, I am here to tell you, a deeply weird movie. One of those ‘80s indie films that sound like you’re making them up when you try to describe the plot to people. It’s not the best of them, but it’s not the worst, either. The worst, of course, is just a race to the bottom.

Between Raoul and Chakotay were a ton of the kinds of roles that someone named Robert Beltran was going to get in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Frankly, many of them are bewildering. For every episode of Miami Vice—of course he did an episode of Miami Vice—you get something like Night of the Comet, featuring Valley Girls, cannibal zombies, and sinister scientists. There’s The Mystic Warrior, where he plays a Sioux warrior who must rescue his people using the powers of his ancestors. Obviously this balances playing one of the Watergate burglars in Nixon.

Usually, I’d be happy to inform you that he’s doing Shakespeare on the stage. Unfortunately, it’s for the LaRouche Youth Movement. (IMDb adds “of the Democratic party,” but the Democrats aren’t exactly happy with the idea of being associated with them.) And the Schiller Institute. Which may have a history of antisemitism. They promote what they call “peace through development.” Surely Beltran should be aware of how that goes for the people seen as undeveloped.