Just after Christmas 2020, we were given a beautiful gossip story, a terrific scandal: Hilaria Baldwin had been faking her Spanish backstory and accent for years. All of it was a huge con, a systematic appropriation of “Spanish exoticism.” For years, Hilaria told people she was “from Spain” and even “born in Mallorca.” For years, she claimed that her family lived in Spain and/or came from Spain, and that she came to America as a teenager. As it turns out, she was born and raised in Massachusetts as a plain old Hillary Thomas, with extensive American roots. The one Spanish connection she has is that her parents apparently moved to Spain when they retired. That does not make her Spanish. When the story broke more than four years ago, there were lots of lies and backtracks and “no, I never said that, you just assumed!” In times of crisis, she even dusts off her faithful old Mexican accent (because she can’t even appropriate correctly). Anyway, now that Hilaria is part of a new TLC show about her family, she once again tries to talk around her years of lies.
Hilaria Baldwin is addressing her Spanish accent. In the premiere of the new TLC reality show The Baldwins, which comes out Feb. 23, Hilaria, 41, spoke out about the 2020 controversy over her accent after people began to question the authenticity of her Spanish origins. Years later, she said no one can stop her from embracing her identity.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,” she noted in a confessional. “I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.”
“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” she continued. “That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
When it comes to the children she shares with husband Alec Baldwin — Ilaria Catalina Irena, 2, María Lucía Victoria, 3, Eduardo “Edu” Pao Lucas, 4, Romeo Alejandro David, 6, Leonardo Ángel Charles, 8, Rafael Thomas, 9, and Carmen Gabriela, 11 — Hilaria said no public criticism will stop her from bringing her Spanish culture into their lives.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual,” she explained. “My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special.”
We talked about this a lot when Hilaria was first outed – plenty of people feel drawn to other cultures and take great interest in a culture foreign to them. Some people are Francophiles, some are Anglophiles, some are Sinophiles, etc. That’s what you call yourself though – an admirer of another culture, an outsider who has a deep interest in a different culture. Loving Spain and speaking Spanish doesn’t make Hilaria SPANISH, it makes her an Iberophile. People didn’t “out” her for speaking Spanish. They outed her for pretending to be a Spanish woman who faked a pan-Latin-American accent for years. Plenty of people teach their kids multiple languages, it’s not about that either – at no point were people like “I can’t believe she teaches her kids a second language!” Also… the Spanish names for the kids are still so ridiculous, my god. I don’t even believe that Hilaria is all that interested in Spanish culture, she’s like the worst kind of culture vulture, she’s only interested in the most superficial aspects of being fake-Spanish.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
