Hilaria Baldwin pretended to be Spanish wtf?!

[Ballstothis148]

This is the least important and most weird story of 2020.... this woman comes up on my Instagram a lot as a suggested page. Tbh I don’t find her interesting but know she’s Spanish and is into health, having babies with Alec Baldwin and that’s pretty much it. She speaks with a Spanish accent, on her IG page she calls her children “Baldwinitos” I do remember an article saying when she speaks Spanish to her kids people confuse her for a nanny so I thought an interesting take on a European mum in the States.

Except it’s all a lie. She’s not remotely Spanish. Her wealthy Boston parents (no Spanish ancestry) now have a holiday home there.

What is wrong with people?! I include me for being too interested :) why pretend to be Spanish? In one interview she even pretended she didn’t know the word for cucumber as her English isn’t that good

Oh and she’s not even called Hilaria, she’s called Hilary. This year I swear... what an odd story!! I did know a girl who went very French after a romance there one year... maybe it’s a thing!

I do love a call for "peer reviewed sources" on a gossip thread. Not just this one, it's everywhere on MN.

So this begs the question: what is race/ ethnicity/ nationality. My df is from a non European country but I have had no contact with him or anyone from his country. When I was about 12 I went through a really cringey faze of putting up posters of the country, listening to the ‘indigenous’ music of the country, trying to cook the food, dressing in the football kit etc. Was that any less of an appropriation because of my genetics? It was still a British person doing a pastiche of what they believe that country’s culture is, with no insight into what it is to ‘be’ that nationality. IMO Hilary seems to be doing the same.

Phase!

@Alondra don't they speak Catalan in Mallorca?

@Mumoftwoinprimary I am sure you are better than you think you are 😊

they do speak mallorquin which is basically catalan,more specifically valencian i think. v similar
the graffiti in mallorca is in catalan/valencian!

oh, they are the same actually. I know that from wikipedia

[quote PurplePansy05]@Mumoftwoinprimary I am sure you are better than you think you are 😊[/quote]
That’s very kind but I suspect I am actually worse than I think I am.

@RosesinGranGransgarden I am inclined to cut her a lot of slack because one half of boston is walking around saying ''i'm irish'' and the other half is saying ''Im British'' so it's the kind of zeitgeist there that you're not simply American, you're something-else-american.

@IcedPurple

That you are talking shit about an issue you have no idea. You are not Spanish and don't speak Spanish but apparently you are an expert identifying the culture of a woman who do speak perfect Castilian.

Why so aggressive?

She may speak flawless Spanish - good for her - but I've known people to speak flawless, almost accentless English even though they never lived in an English speaking country prior to adulthood. These people certainly don't 'identify' as British nor would they ask anyone to consider them British.

Hilary Thomas is American.

I'm no aggressive but I'm losing patience. I don't know how much you know about languages and phonetics. Castilian is a basic phonetic language, which makes it very difficult to attain good pronunciation in English, German or Scandinavian languages if they are learnt as an adult. Castilian doesn't have the pitch or depth of sound germanic languages do and is the reason we keep our strong accent even if we obtain a PHD in English.

For Hilaria to have her Castilian accent she must have learned it as a child. She cannot fake it. It may fool you, it doesn't fool me and I'm a Spaniard.

My last post on this issue.

rather than a regional Spanish accent, it is more the accent taught when a person learns it later and as a second language - that's the difference in my opinion - some people may not be able to necessarily spot that though.

I'm confused. On the handful of videos I've just watched, she only seems to have an American accent?

@Summerdayshaze

She’s a Spanish person born in the wrong country. Imagine how awful that must feel. I think she’s being very brave. Especially after she got deadnamed.

I agree. I was born into the wrong family and should actually be in one where I will inherit millions from a long lost uncle (society must be discriminating against me if it disagrees or doesn’t make that happen).

@SnowyOwlWan

I don't think so. In my humble opinion she just got carried a way with a version of herself but because it's all so public, she's been rumbled spectacularly. Lots of people have embellished their family backgrounds to sound more interesting.

I think, as she was doing it, she thought ''it could be interpreted that way'' so that in the moment, she didn't feel that she was lying. I reckon she thought, I have family in spain, I speak spanish, I spent some of my childhood there, my parents are there now......

So it kind of felt like the truth to her.

Like I say - an episode of Miranda. An episode of Miranda that I’d really like to watch actually. Particularly the bit when she gets all caught out and is having a stress at the camera. She’d do it brilliantly!

Castilian is much easier to "imitate" than Scandinavian or Germanic when learned as a second language - some people may feel inhibited as it does require "doing an impersonation of a Spanish person" but Hilaira has no such inhibitions which is why she does a good job of it.

Hilairia speaking in a regional Spanish accent I would imagine would be more difficult for her to have learned, but speaking the version of Spanish taught as "standardised foreign language" is what you'd expect when someone has learned it as a second language.

Some people are just better at accents. I do my best to have as little an accent as I can in English, but it will probably take me a couple of more years to eliminate it.

My DH speaks 5 languages and in 3 of them he sounds native, he learnt to speak mine in a couple of months.

I'm no aggressive but I'm losing patience. I don't know how much you know about languages and phonetics.

For Hilaria to have her Castilian accent she must have learned it as a child. She cannot fake it. It may fool you, it doesn't fool me and I'm a Spaniard.

She may well have learned Spanish as a child. Lots of children learn foreign languages from an early age. However, none of that changes the fact - and it is a fact - that she was born, raised and educated in the US and only visited Spain for brief periods on holidays. She is not Spanish, however she might 'identify'.

Post-graduate degree in Applied Linguistics.

@Alondra I haven't read where anybody makes a bigger claim on behalf of her spanish than it is really good and would fool a non native.

@GreenlandTheMovie

So many people embelish the truth in Hollywood, I don't understand why this particular instance is getting so much attention.

For instance, Keanu Reeves' girlfriend has apparently faked loads of stuff about being a successful artist, claimed she has sold work for £x when she has y, exhibited where she hasn't and been educated where she hasn't. She has gained paid work directly as a result.

I'm fact, my ex's replacemebt girlfriend faked an interest in sports and running until she got him hooked, then dropped the pretence. Loads of people exaggerate or downright lie. This woman isn't claiming to be black to gain special treatment, she has literally lived in Spain and speaks Spanish and looks quite Spanish. Who knows exactly what her ancestry is? This is very different from fabricating an entire education and career, as Keanu Reeves' girlfriend has purportedly done.

IcedPurple you do know that Wikipedia isn't a reliable or definitive source, don't you?

Why is it always women who get exposed as being frauds though? There's a real sexist undercurrent around this kind of social media feeding frenzy.

I honestly thought that Keanu Reeve's girlfriend might escape this trial by social media due to the fact that he is so well liked, he lives a low-key life, he doesnt court publicity, she's not a celebrity and is just a normal person, but no. The keyboard warriors combed through everything in her past to somehow discredit her work and crow about how fake she is. It's sickening.

Hilaria obviously speaks fluent Spanish and enjoys the culture; let her live her life. She hasn't committed any crimes. She hasn't killed anyone. She identified with something that's clearly a huge part of her life. No, it's not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but what celebrity is 100% factually accurate at all times?

Why must the Internet tear people to shreds for various minor crimes? God, I'd hate to be famous.

*I'm no aggressive but I'm losing patience. I don't know how much you know about languages and phonetics. Castilian is a basic phonetic language, which makes it very difficult to attain good pronunciation in English, German or Scandinavian languages if they are learnt as an adult. Castilian doesn't have the pitch or depth of sound germanic languages do and is the reason we keep our strong accent even if we obtain a PHD in English.

For Hilaria to have her Castilian accent she must have learned it as a child. She cannot fake it. It may fool you, it doesn't fool me and I'm a Spaniard.

My last post on this issue.*

You see - this is the fascinating bit. Who taught her Spanish that well? Her parents careers are fairly well documented (on their own site so presumably accurate) so she can’t have spent more than a few weeks a year in Spain. Which isn’t good enough to get the perfect accent. Her dad did a degree in Spanish literature so could presumably speak Spanish fairly well. But probably not with a good enough accent to get her her perfect accent. I suspect a Spanish Nanny. Both parents had serious careers so there must have been a nanny. And if they wanted to raise her bilingual (and it seems they did) then it makes sense that a Spanish nanny who speaks only Spanish to her and her brother would make sense. I’d do it myself if I had that sort of money! Also explains why she and her brother speak Spanish to each other.

Her perfect Castilan says she grew up in Spain. It's impossible for her to have the accent unless she grew up in Spain.

I think that’s nonsense. One of the best French speakers I ever knew had never even been there.

Honestly, the fact someone can speak the language perfectly proves nothing. I can speak three at the same level and change accents between them in one sentence if I want to and most native people don't realise I'm not a native until I introduce myself and my name makes it obvious. This isn't bragging, it's a fact of life that some people are linguistically talented, perhaps more than others. It has no bearing on determining their nationality.

Same and have to echo this, although my first name is not English, so confusing. I’ve had to get my ID out to prove I’m English on occasion. That’s not a brag, it’s just what happens sometimes if you speak another language well/at native level.

I would argue, however, that properly bilingual people aren’t necessarily brilliant linguists. The amount of bilingual students I’ve known who can’t differentiate between written verb endings/tenses Is huge. Millions of people are bilingual and sound like natives in whichever language, including a friend who taught himself Russian and has a strong Ukrainian accent.

Watching Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation last night (topical, Alec Baldwin is in it!) and it took me a couple of minutes to realise that the main actress isn’t well-spoken British, she’s actually Swedish.

Banderas then recalled filling out an official form in the U.S.: When he went to check the box for "white" under race, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic.

"I said, 'Hispanic isn't actually a race,' " Banderas told Ramos, but he went ahead and checked the Hispanic box. "Great, I'm happy to be Hispanic, Spanish, Latino, and if I'm a person of color, well then I'm a person of color."

The idea that Banderas is a white European may be obvious to many, especially those in the Latinx community, but it's not the first time a white Spaniard has been referred to in the U.S. as a "person of color" or Latinx.

After all, Spaniards are technically considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines the term as "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race"

www.npr.org/2020/02/09/803809670/why-labeling-antonio-banderas-a-person-of-color-triggers-such-a-backlash

Well, they did used to consider Irish people ''black''!

They do their own labelling.

@zanahoria it is fascinating. My dad considers himself white, but he has to tick the mestizo box on the census . In his country he is white, in the US he would be a Latino, therefore a person of colour. Surely people can define their own race, but then again that’s how we get the odd Hilaria.

:26MichelleScarn
Fuckingcrustybread

@Pinkywoo
"Really? ACTUAL violence? You obviously don't know the meaning of the words"
Perhaps you've never heard the phrase taking the piss.

Oops sorry, my sarcasm radar obviously doesn't work when up in the night with the baby, I'm bloody relieved you were joking!