Why didn't a studio audience lynch Desi Arnaz for miscegenation?

The 2025 NYT is baffled by the 1951 racial status of the co-star of "I Love Lucy."

The achievements of the husband-wife team of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in creating modern American television in the 1950s are so extensive that it’s not important to argue over who was the real genius of the pair. There is plenty of glory for both.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact of how popular Desi and Lucy were from 1951 onward with current stereotypes about how racist white Americans were before the Civil Rights Era. Why didn’t the whites in the studio audience charge the stage and lynch Desi for defiling Lucy?

21st Century America has managed to socially construct the concept of a Hispanic/Latino race rather than an ethnicity comprising multiple races and their admixtures. So now our forgetful journalists are projecting today’s concepts back onto a very different age, as in this example from the New York Times opinion section:

Hollywood Couldn’t Imagine a Star Like This One

May 18, 2025

By Todd S. Purdum

Mr. Purdum, a former Times correspondent, is the author of a forthcoming biography of Desi Arnaz.

… The movie star was Lucille Ball, and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950 a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan. …

Racism was a fact of daily life even in Arnaz’s adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where some restaurants still refused service to Latinos.

Was prominent bandleader and movie star Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III of aristocratic Spanish descent refused service in Hollywood restaurants? Really?

Desi’s 1949 movie “Holiday in Havana”

The term “D.E.I.” did not yet exist, but Arnaz’s gambit amounted to a bold push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the white-bread monoculture of a dawning mass medium that was sponsor-driven and cautious to a fault. …

White-bread …

Actually, late 1940s TV was highly Jewish rather than “white-bread.” For example, I can recall reading in the L.A. Times in 1981 that NBC was celebrating finally not having to pay one million dollars per year anymore to Milton Berle because the 30 year / million dollar per year contract NBC had signed with the then-superstar in 1951 had finally expired.

Why had NBC made such a disastrous deal? Because TV rolled out after WWII first in the biggest cities, which were heavily Jewish. Early affluent TV-owning urban audiences loved Uncle Miltie, who reminded them of their own uncles.

But as TV spread across the country in the 1950s, the new audiences found, to the surprise of New York TV executives, that a little Milton Berle went a long ways for most Americans.

(In contrast to Milton Berle, “I Love Lucy” is showing in reruns somewhere right now.)

At a time when so many universities, cultural and business institutions are retreating from formal efforts to increase inclusion and the federal government is working to discourage and erase diversity efforts in all areas of life, Arnaz’s tactics offer an instructive example for performers and institutions alike.

Arnaz’s differences — the very elements that made network chiefs hesitant to feature him — became his greatest strengths … He was the one TV star who did not look or sound like any other — he was forever telling Lucy she had some “’splainin’ to do” — an immigrant who became the all-American man. …

Behind the scenes, Arnaz rose to become the most prominent Latino entertainment executive of his day and one of the most prominent Latino creative forces in the history of Hollywood.

Desilu Studios was a huge maker of TV shows. When the couple divorced in 1960, Lucille Ball took charge of the studio. She greenlighted, for example, Star Trek.

He remains the rarity that proves the necessity — indeed, the essential Americanness — of diversity.

He looked and sounded nothing like the preconceived notion that the entertainment business had of a successful star. So he changed the way Hollywood did business and whom we can imagine as stars. Anyone who can’t understand that has some ’splainin’ to do.

Okaaaay …

Well, actually …

Paywall here. 1,350 more words after the break.

There were a fair number of Latin movie stars at this time:

For example, the year before I Love Lucy debuted in 1951, the 1950 Best Actor Oscar was won by Puerto Rican Jose Ferrer for Cyrano. Ferrer’s three wives, whom he began marrying in 1938, were all Northern European actresses: Uta Hagen, Phyllis Hill, and Rosemary Clooney, George Clooney’s popular blonde songbird aunt.

Ferrer, the son of a lawyer, is described as being of “Spanish descent.” He was educated at a boarding school in Switzerland and graduated from Princeton.

There were other Latin entertainment stars, including Leo Carillo, a Californio whose locally prominent ancestors first arrived in Alta California in 1769. His kin had served as mayors of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Santa Barbara. A master of comic accents, Carillo was much admired in mid-20th Century California. One of the most beautiful beaches in Los Angeles County was named after him: Leo Carillo State Park.

In the 1920s, gay Mexian Ramon Novarro succeeded the gay Italian Rudolph Valentino as the top “Latin Lover” leading man of silent movies. His father was a dentist in Durango, Mexico and his mother was the daughter of a rich landowner who boasted of being descended from Aztec king Montezuma.

Mexican-born Dolores Del Rio was a fairly big Hollywood name in the late 1920s and 1930s, then returned to Mexico and reigned over its film industry.

Gilbert Roland, yet another Mexican refugee from the Mexican Revolution like Novarro (Roland came from a line of Spanish bullfighters), enjoyed a long Hollywood career from the 1920s into the 1980s.

Ceasar Romero’s Hollywood career began in the 1930s as Latin Lovers in supporting roles and is best remembered today for playing The Joker on the 1960s Batman series. He was said to be the illegitimate grandson of Cuban national hero Jose Marti. He called himself “a Latin from Manhattan.”

Mexican Lupe Velez was successful as a Mexican Spitfire in the 1920s-1940s. Her marriage to Olympian/Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller was stormy.

Portgual-born Brazilian Bombshell Carmen Miranda was a sensation in Hollywood during WWII. Today, nobody is sure whether that qualifies her as Hispanic/Latina, although sentiment seems to be growing in that regard to favor treating Brazilians as People of Color no matter what they look like.

Mexican-born two-time Oscar winner Anthony Quinn’s Hollywood career began in the 1930s and took off in the early 1950s.

Argentinean movie star Fernando Lamas’s first Hollywood movie was in 1950. He became the inspiration for his sailing buddy Jonathan Goldsmith’s wonderful “The Most Interesting Man in the World” beer Dos Equis commercials: e.g., “Cheating is only forgivable when it comes to death.”

A common trait among these mid-Century Latin movie stars is that they tended to be more aristocratic in their bearing than American stars. They tended to radiate Conquistador breeding. Pedro Pascal, a kinsman of overthrown Chilean Marxist president Salvador Allende, is the current exemplar of this varietal of Hollywood star.

Desi didn’t emphasize that side of himself too much on TV, but his genealogy is upper class Cuban. From Wikipedia:

His father was Santiago's youngest mayor and also served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His maternal grandfather was Alberto de Acha, an executive at rum producer Bacardi & Co. A descendant of Cuban nobility, Arnaz was a great-great-great-grandson of José Joaquín, a mayor of Santiago de Cuba. The Cuban Revolution of 1933 forced Arnaz and his family to lose everything and flee Cuba. A mob attacked and destroyed the family's houses, property, and livestock.

The Cuban Revolution of 1933 began with the Sergeant’s Coup, led by populist mulatto sergeant Fulgencio Batista.

A lot of Hollywood’s Latin American movie stars were affluent refugees from populist and/or leftist revolutions back home. (Pascal is an upper class leftist version of this pattern. Another of his relatives is prominent novelist Isabel Allende, the politician’s daughter.)

Similarly, Golden Age Hollywood employed as extras many exiled Russian aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats (like famous restauranteur Prince Michael Romanoff, a Lithuanian Jewish pants-presser). The Russian exile extras were used in ballroom scenes because they could all waltz, had superb manners, and could provide their own formal attire.

Interestingly, fewer Russian than Latin exiles made it to stardom in Hollywood. The only one I can think of is the most exotic-looking, Yul Brynner, whose wealthy Vladivostok family fled the Reds in 1922. Quinn, Brynner, and Omar Shariff were in many big budget movies in the postwar era because they could be cast as just about any ethnicity other than black.

Americans back then were in some ways more multiculturally sensitive than modern Americans. They were probably more aware that Latin Americans had strong views about race that didn’t jibe with North American preoccupations with the One Drop of Blood rule for defining who was black. And they were more amenable to accepting Latin self-definitions of their race. For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens got the Census Bureau to simply make all Latin Americans on the 1950 and 1960 Census white.

Of course, with the invention of affirmative action in 1969, activists demanded that Latinos be instead given their own separate privileged ethnicity, while allowing them to also assert their blue-blooded racial whiteness if they so chose). But that clever Nixonian innovation is fading because practically nobody understands it anymore, and so the Biden Administration started the ball rolling for Hispanic/Latino to be simply another race on the 2030 Census.

Plus, white Americans weren’t all that worked up over Amerindian or Asian ancestry they way they were over black ancestry. Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s vice-president, was famously part-Indian and born on a reservation. Brynner looked more East Asian than he was genealogically, but his looks were considered cool in ultra-mainstream movies like The King and I, The Ten Commandments, and The Magnificent Seven.

And North Americans cut Latin Americans with some marginal black ancestry more slack than they would have cut fellow Americans.

An interesting story is Cuban slugger Roberto Estalella, who might have broken major league baseball’s color line in 1935, a dozen years before Jackie Robinson, if more than a few people had bothered to notice he was kinda black:

Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith shaking the hand of Roberto Estalella, sometime between 1935 and 1942

Joanne Hulbert’s biography of Bobby Estalella for the Society of American Baseball Researchers says:

Major-league teams of the 1930s, mindful of baseball’s unwritten color-line, had been walking a thin line in order not to cause controversy and also not to rile other players who might abuse a new player with darker skin. If Clark Griffith was curious, he never outwardly appeared to be concerned. A few American-born players cast the usual epithets, and other Cuban players who knew Estalella considered him to be of mixed-race heritage and had little interest or concern about his skin color. Many baseball historians contend that Estalella slipped under the discriminatory barrier that kept many great players with darker skin from reaching the major leagues before Jackie Robinson.

Author and academic Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria writes that Estalella was “a very light mulatto …white enough to play in the American League and in Organized Baseball.” Throughout his career in major-league baseball, questions about his ancestry were a shadow behind the headlines. Many of his teammates and a few prominent sportswriters of the era considered him to be black. Shirley Povich wrote that there was blatant racism: “Estalella was the first of the Cubans in the American League in a couple of decades and it was a tribute to him that he did hit .400 one season while ducking dust-off pitches from guys who didn’t cotton to his particular pigmentation.” Decades later, when asked to comment about it, Estalella simply answered, “It was only an issue for the Americans.”

Of course, if you were a clearly black Cuban, like the great Martin Dihigo (1906-1971), a Shohei Ohtani-like pitcher and hitter whom Dodger executive Al Campanis called the best ballplayer he ever saw, you couldn’t slip in under the radar until after Jackie Robinson.

So, why didn’t a 1951 studio audience lynch Desi Arnaz for being married to Lucille Ball?

Because they saw him as white (which he was).