“Part Spanish” was honestly pretty good for second-season Zorro, I’m afraid; the numbers of actually Hispanic performers is definitely higher in season one. One paternal grandparent was from Spain and her father was born in Manila; one maternal grandparent was from Italy and her mother was born in Budapest. She’s also different from a lot of other guest stars in that she was a major character in multiple episodes. She gets to play a firebrand with a crush on Don Diego, and there are worse roles. I’m sure she could tell you which ones she did.

Of course, she doesn’t have to work these days. Anyone who did an episode of Star Trek can just coast on the convention circuit for the rest of their lives. However, Luna does not seem to be interested in that. Her Wikipedia page claims she’s appeared on over 500 TV series—IMDb lists a more conservative 88—and she’s done no few movies as well. Apparently, she also toured five times as Anita in West Side Story, a role she apparently lost to Rita Moreno.

It is true, though, that her one Star Trek episode is a lot better remembered than her four of Zorro, even if she did get to sing a Hazel George song about tamales on the latter. On the former, she was “the captain’s woman” on the “Mirror, Mirror” episode, the one that gave us Star Trek‘s version of parallel universes. Perhaps she’s not as iconic as Evil Spock, Scarred Sulu, or Midriff-Bared Uhura, but still; it’s a memorable role in a memorable episode. And “not as iconic as a variation of one of the main characters” is still pretty iconic, after all.

And who knows; maybe she’d rather you ask her about Ship of Fools or Elmer Gantry. Sure, some of what she’s done over the years has been obscure and bad, but she’s also done some really famous stuff. She’s performed with Oscar winners, and not in the movies that won’t get mentioned in their obituaries, either. I’m willing to bet they come up less often than her Star Trek appearance, but be fair; I’m pretty sure she was playing considerably more minor characters there.

An interesting data point is that, by my count based on IMDb (since Wikipedia doesn’t have a full list for its claim of how many shows she did), she did episodes of eighteen Westerns—if you include Zorro as a Western—between 1958 and 1970. You can throw in a few more in later years, including The Young Riders, but still. There are a lot of Westerns in those years, more than I think people remember. Enough so that I checked the plot summaries of certain shows because I’d never heard of them but they sounded like Westerns. People underestimate how big the Western craze really was, but there were eighteen Western shows in those twelve years for her to appear on, and who knows how many that she did not.

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