The influencer wife
Oh no, people questioning someone’s identity again. People are what they say they are! Unless they’re TERFs who object to being called TERFs of course; that’s completely different.
Last week, a Twitter sleuth sketched out how Hilaria Baldwin, the influencer wife of actor (and sometime SNL star) Alec Baldwin, has perpetrated “a decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”
Or rather, pretends to be a Spanish person. Impersonating one means a specific one, as opposed to a generic one. She was going for the generic.
The user, who goes by the handle @lenibriscoe, shared a number of damning videos of “Hilaria,” from a Good Morning America appearance where she employed a Spanish accent to a Today show stop in which she supposedly could not remember the English word for “cucumber.”
Further posts showed Hilaria’s mother discussing growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and numerous articles pointed to how she had spent virtually her entire career practicing medicine in Massachusetts, where she’d served as “an associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School” until she “retired from both positions in 2012,” according to MassLive. (In a video interview she said she moved to Mallorca, Spain, in 2011, the same year Hilaria began dating Alec.)
And yet…
Hilaria Baldwin’s CAA speaker page claims that she was born in Mallorca, Spain, as does her IMDb bio and Wikipedia page. She said on a podcast earlier this year: “I moved here [to America] when I was 19 to go to NYU from… my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca,” adding, “I knew no pop culture.” She has graced the cover of Hola! magazine, a Spanish-language publication based out of Madrid, where she was identified as a Spanish person in both the interview and its press release. Alec Baldwin has repeatedly referred to her as “Spanish” online. And she’s made a number of appearances in Latina magazine, which she’s enthusiastically promoted (Spain is not a part of Latin America, by the way), and has referred to Spain as her “home.”
Wellllll maybe she meant it’s her spiritual home.
It appears that Hilaria’s real name is Hillary Hayward-Thomas, according to her old MySpace page and those who claim to be her old classmates. She attended the private Cambridge School of Weston, in Massachusetts, and in her senior yearbook is listed as “Hillary Hayward-Thomas.”
So, is there anything tacky about this at all? Does it qualify as appropriation? Is it comparable to Rachel Dolezal, or is it just someone who is smitten with a foreign country where she has spent a lot of time and likes to pretend to have deep roots in that country when she doesn’t? And if we’re all free to define ourselves in whatever terms we like, then why is this even a story?
Now about this word “influencer”…
I am sick of buzzwords. I am tired of being told I should be a change maker, practice mindfulness, and whatever other new thing is the rage today. Academia is rife with them; the academy fairly buzzes with buzzwords. I’m sure I’ll hear this one in our welcome back meetings next week.
As for appropriation? Well, yes, of course it is. She’s not claiming to be a woman with a penis, right? Or a man with a uterus? That’s the only genuine identity we must respect. Everyone else, assigned white American at birth, must remain white American until death…but they are welcome to say they are a white American woman even as their beard, Adam’s apple, and bulge in their jeans suggests otherwise.
It’s all so confusing. My wife is Spanish (as in from Spain; aka, a Spaniard). Our kids were both born and raised in the US, but they have dual citizenship, something I suspect Hilaria doesn’t have (as an aside, Hilaria is not a common name in Spain). I speak Spanish pretty well (I’ve been told I have a Basque accent; despite having lived for almost four years in Madrid, these days I spend most of my time in Spain in the north with my wife’s family), but I do not have Spanish citizenship and would never claim to be Spanish. On the other hand our kids, who spent several summers with their aitites, both have claimed to be Spanish at times, and given their druthers, both would probably prefer to live in Europe (though probably not Spain). By common definitions, my wife and our kids are Hispanic but not Latino, though our daughter (dirty blond hair, brown eyes, definitely White) did benefit from a minority girls club in high school. Oh, and my wife claims to be Basque, because she was born in the Basque country with a Basque name, though in truth most of her ancestry is Asturian (with some Castilian thrown in). Much of her mother’s family is blond, with green eyes, though her mother has black hair and brown eyes. (For the record, the vast majority of Spaniards would be considered White.)
Ethnicity, nationality, even race are such fluid categories, yet if you’re caught trying to claim the “wrong” one, you’ll have hell to pay (just ask Elizabeth Warren).
It is very confusing, isn’t it. There’s also the way Spain and Italy (and Portugal) used to be seen as sort of second-best (by USians at least), which is so bizarre given their rich histories.
Come to think of it I wonder if that was partly a holdover from the war – Allies v Axis.
I think it’s more a north vs. south thing. I mean, Germany wasn’t considered second-best, and Spain and Portugal were never part of the Axis (even if they were friendly). (Also, I think Greece gets the same treatment.)
iknklast@1, Good point. You should be a thought leader!
Yeah, my mother was half Irish half Swedish, but her parents were both born here of immigrant parents, so technically, does that ethnicity even matter? How much of that remains? I mean, really, what am I but garden variety American? I used to feel a real connection with England; when I would read Jane Austen, or other English writers (and I did read a lot of them), I always felt like the moors should be my home, like I belonged there more than here. I do have a longing for the foggy days I always read about (and experienced when I visited England), and the English countryside, but that doesn’t mean it is who I am. I was born in California, raised in New Mexico, Virginia, Maine, and Oklahoma, and now live in Nebraska. There is nothing about me that is English, other than my heritage (my father’s parents were both of English parentage). And my name.
As far as the lower level of respect given to north-coast Mediterraneans (including Spaniards, Italians and Greeks, among others) compared to Germans, Scandinavians and Brits by Americans, it all goes back to that weird concept of ‘whiteness’ we have. If you’re “White”, you’re part of the in-group, and if you’re not, you aren’t, and that’s all there is to it. But the definition of “White” is arbitrary, even moreso than the general idea of race-groups. So for many immigrant groups, the process of assimilation and integration into the American mainstream has been an effort to become considered “White” (rather than trying to rip down the barriers for all non-Whites).
There was a time in the U.S. when even the Irish were not considered ‘white’ (we owe so much of our bullshit to our British forbearers). And we see the process happening now among different Latino and Hispanic groups–I strongly suspect that’s part of what motivates Cuban-American support of the GOP, along with their rabid anti-Castro stance. And having had a fair bit of interaction with both groups, I can attest that both Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans will down-talk the other in an effort to not be seen as bottom of the pile. Some days, humanity just sucks.
First time I watched “The Commitments” I was confused by Jimmy Rabbit’s statement
It was only later when I read of the treatment of the Irish in America that I got a sense of where Roddy Doyle got this idea.
To add to freemage above, there was a time just post WW2 when Australia had a surge of European migrants, the paler Northern Italians were given preference over the darker-skinned Southern Italians. That was in the days when “The White Australia Policy” was still in force.
Today, though, isn’t much of the ethnic antipathy in England aimed at the Poles and other Eastern Europeans?
My culture is band as can be. Midwestern working class from Indiana. I can see one explanation for “appropriation” being an escape from jello salad and fundamentalist Protestantism?
‘when I read of the treatment of the Irish in America’ Not to mention the treatment of the Irish by the British. When I was living in Ireland it wasn’t uncommon to hear Irish people talk about the status of Ireland as ‘leader of the Third World’–the first modern country to overthrow its colonial oppressors.
Hi Guest, yep I was already well aware of the antipathy between the English landholders and the Irish, as with the Scotts during the “Clearances”. Copped a clip round the ear from my English father when I was singing along to “Give Irish Back To The Irish”, even though he had come from an impoverished Northern England and was as working class and trade union as you could find.
I was born in Australia, of mainly Scots-Irish ancestry. A few years back, (in 1977) when Irish jokes were all the rage, and pretty-well world-wide I went on a pilgrimage to visit County Cork, where a good number my ancestors came from. In the pubs and places round and about, ‘Kerryman’ jokes were all in vogue. “Did you hear the one about the Kerryman who went to … etc …etc?” And as I never got to County Kerry, I missed out on their version of it.
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Roj @#11: Moral: never mock your betters. And remember, if you’ve got nobody to look down on, it’s a sure sign that your station in life is right at the bottom of the pile. So on that logic best find someone to consider beneath you. (The Hindus with their caste system had that one well sorted out.) Sounds like your Dad was one of the Alf Garnetts of Hingland: the very backbone of the Hempire.
So if I were to believe Hilaria’s misleading narrative, have I then been ‘influenced?’ Does changing her name from Hillary to Hilaria count as ‘influencing’ because everyone calls her that? I’m not sure how they measure what an ‘influencer’ influences. Aren’t proselytizers also ‘influencers?’
This is an interesting, and hilarious, case. The woman in question does speak Spanish very well. Here’s a clip:
https://youtu.be/2I_kujj45lc?t=62
She speaks Spanish well enough to fool Spaniards, who believed she was a mallorquina for years:
https://www.elmundo.es/loc/2014/02/13/52fb77a7e2704e800f8b457c.html
https://www.hechosdehoy.com/hilaria-thomas-la-espaola-que-rob-el-corazn-a-alec-baldwin-20070.htm
It appears that they met in Manhattan in 2011 (the year her parents moved to Mallorca, and perhaps the year that her fiction began). Later, Baldwin moved to Spain to film this movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEH4G2Qsk2U
Which now, to be honest, I want to see.
I agree that “grift” is an incorrect term for her pretense. Grift is when you are trying to fool somebody to make money off it. I suspect that her pretense began when her parents moved to Mallorca, upon their retirement. Perhaps when somebody asked where her family lived, she said Mallorca and that lead to her saying not just that her family was in Mallorca but that her family was from Mallorca. Maybe at some point it was just a misunderstanding, whose prospective correction became more embarrassing with time.
Regarding ‘influencer’, this is the term for people who use social media that have a large following. In particular, if a person gained that following entirely through new media, and was not already ‘mainstream famous’, they are called an influencer.
I recently looked at what google search had to say about “right to an identity” and discovered that at least some official references involved nationality, name, family relationships and race — with “gender” only a recent addition. The most popular example of violations involved children being kidnapped from heathen or indigenous tribes and forcibly indoctrinated into being Christian or white or enlightened. I couldn’t find any mention of a group being harmed by someone appropriating membership. I’d assume that someone taking a scholarship or other benefit under false pretenses would already be covered.
I didn’t do much research, though.
So about this puzzle of USian attitudes to different countries or regions in Europe, and “Whiteness” (Freemage @ 7) – that’s how we explain it now, maybe, but it wasn’t how people explained it all along. Not that I know how people did explain it, because I don’t recall it as official and explained but more as a fog. Part of it is Protestant v Catholic, part of it is Stalin’s takeover which made all of Eastern Europe a kind of Mordor, part of it is rich v poor…and none of it made much sense.
Mind you it wasn’t only a fog, it was also for instance codified in US immigration law.
Ophelia@17: Oh, I never meant to suggest it was a conscious, deliberate process. Like so much of sexism, racism and white supremacy formed organically and unconsciously. If anyone had bothered to ask, “So what does ‘white’ mean, exactly?” the entire artifice would’ve fallen apart immediately. You simply picked up from context who was white and who wasn’t, and then passed that along to others.
No, I know, but I’m saying I think it kind of was and wasn’t specifically racism. It was a jumble of stuff. It was racism-like, it was racism-adjacent, but it was muddled. Racism itself is muddled of course, so the distinction doesn’t really matter.
It’s ridiculous; the woke are trying to pretend that someone pretending at being another type of white person, specifically the nationality that financed Christopher Columbus, built the missions, sent Cortez to ruin the Americas, drove the Moors out of Spain, and generally was the first strong *colonizing* power in the New World is a problem…
It’s silly and it’s stupid but who really cares?
I once had a long conversation with a good friend of mine, who is a Japanese-American, about appropriation. She had been very offended that a group of white and Chinese protesters shut down an event at the museum that allowed visitors to try on, and take a picture of themselves in, a kimono. The protesters insisted that this was cultural appropriation, you know, all the usual, orientalism, the male gaze, whatever. My friend, let’s call her Keiko, insisted that it wasn’t their culture that they were talking about, and in her culture, Japanese culture, trying on kimonos and having your picture taken in them was something that people did. She was very bothered that people from another culture were preventing people from her culture from sharing their own culture with the museum visitors. The kimonos in question had literally been fabricated for the specific purpose of being tried on at a museum exhibit as a cultural event. But they were packed away, the exhibit was canceled, and the museum apologized for their cultural crimes.
In our long conversations about the matter, we decided that, like racism, appropriation can only happen where there is a power differential, or subordination. Japan does not see itself as subordinate to America, America does not see itself as subordinate to Japan, thus there can be no cultural appropriation by Japanese of American culture, nor cultural appropriation by Americans of Japanese culture. The question of whether Japanese can appropriate Black American culture is more complex, but let’s not get into that.
Can an American appropriate Spanish culture? What does that really mean? Can a Spaniard appropriate American culture? I tend to think no (either way), whereas an American can appropriate, say, Mexican culture.
My wife studies Flamenco, both singing and dancing. She adores it. She is of Cuban extraction, visibly Hispanic, but born in America. Is she appropriating Spanish culture? Are the many Japanese who study Flamenco appropriating Spanish culture? (Flamenco is hugely popular in Japan) The Spanish don’t seem to think so.
Hilarious pretended to be really Spanish instead of just loving Spain and Spanish culture. But I don’t think that can count as appropriation as much as flattery. I think the Spanish are much more upset that she stuck her foot in her mouth by saying that she’s a white girl, and there are lots of white people in Europe… as if saying that Spanish people aren’t white.
[…] a comment by Papito on The influencer […]
She responded to the criticism, as described in this article, and what she’s quoted as saying makes sense to me. People do change accents depending on mood and circumstances; I do, my wife does, lots of people do. People do forget common words; I do this embarrassingly often. She has absorbed the culture of her family and her upbringing; it isn’t anyone else’s business whether it matches that of a particular nation or region. If she’s being inaccurate about where she was born or how much time she spent in Spain as a child, that’s not good but not a big deal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55497200