Hilaria Baldwin is opening up on the controversy surrounding her accent. On a recent episode of her TLC reality series, The Baldwins, the 41-year-old shared that the reason why she alternates between Spanish and American accents is “code-switching.” Ever since she shot to fame after her marriage to Alec Baldwin in 2012, the yoga instructor has faced criticism for her Spanish heritage.
Hilaria Baldwin addresses controversy surrounding her Spanish accent
In a 2020 podcast, Hilaria claimed she was born in Mallorca and raised in Boston, adding that she moved to the United States at the age of 19. But, social media sleuths uncovered at the time that she was born and raised in the States, according to Fox News. She later apologised for the “confusion” in an Instagram post and argued that “culture, languages, sexual orientations, religions [and] political beliefs” are “allow[ed] to be fluid.”
Reflecting on the constant backlash surrounding her accent on Sunday’s episode of her TLC show, Hilaria said, “Being in the spotlight, as people like to call it. People say, ‘Oh, don’t you get used to it?’ No, you don’t get used to it.” “You never get used to people being mean. But you take a deep breath, and I think you learn to distance yourself from it, and so, you know, you just try turning down the volume in my head a bit… and I’m not gonna take it personally.”
Hilaria went on to say that she developed the habit of “code-switching” after the “whole world was mean” to her because of her mixed heritage. “Growing up in a way where you have multiple cultural influences on you means that you’re never going to be able to fit in. You can try,” she said. “You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch, we’re very good at chameleoning… and you don’t even think, you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just normal. It’s just natural.”
“They say that it’s like communication if you ever talk to a really old person who cannot hear, and I’m gonna emphasize, I’m gonna speak slower,” Hilaria went on, adding, “And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it.” “You know what it’s called? Code-switching… I had to learn about it because the whole world was mean to me, and so I had to learn it. It’s code-switching,” she added, per the outlet.
