Yahoo Lifestyle Hilaria Baldwin Defends Her Accent In New TLC Show, Calls It 'Normal' And 'Being Human'
Hilaria Baldwin defended her Spanish accent on her new TLC reality show with her husband, Alec Baldwin, saying that mixing English and Spanish doesn’t make her “inauthentic,” it makes her “normal.”
During the first episode of TLC’s “The Baldwins,” which premieres Sunday, the former yoga instructor quickly addresses accusations that she has appropriated Spanish culture and faked her accent, a claim that went viral in 2020. She says she was raised speaking Spanish and English and is raising her seven children to do the same.
Hilaria Baldwin was born in Boston, despite her biography on the website for the Creative Arts Agency and several articles in ¡Hola! magazine initially saying she was a Spaniard.She was known as Hillary until 2009, and she told The New York Times in 2020 that her Spanish accent comes and goes depending on how happy or upset she is. In a July 2021 Instagram post, she wrote that her cultural background is “multi” and “fluid.”
During the first episode of the TLC show, Baldwin said her nuclear family lives in Spain now and she considers it “special” to have grown up speaking two different languages.
“I love English,” she said. “I also love Spanish. And when I mix the two, that doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, that makes me normal.”
She added that the accusations of cultural appropriation made her “sad” and put her in “dark places.”
“But it was my family, my friends, my community, who speak multiple languages, who have belonging 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. That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
“The Baldwins” follows Hilaria and Alec Baldwin as they navigate their 26-year age gap while they raise their seven children.
