Hilaria Baldwin is addressing the controversy surrounding claims that her Spanish accent is fabricated.
The yoga instructor from Boston—who is mother to Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo and Marilu, both 4 and Ilaria, 2, with spouse Alec Baldwin—tackles the questions about her cultural background, and accent in the first episode of her family’s new TLC reality series The Baldwins.
“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,” Hilaria says during the Feb. 23 episode, per People. “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.”
She continued, “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.”
The 41-year-old emphasized that this cultural blending is “normal” and is “called being human,” while firmly stating that she’s transmitting her diverse heritage to her children.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual,” Hilaria says. “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.”
The mother of seven initially responded to the speculation shortly after it gained widespread attention in late 2020.
“If I’ve been speaking a lot of Spanish, I tend to mix them and if I’m speaking more English…then I mix that,” she said in an emotional Instagram video at the time. “It’s one of those things that’s always been a little bit, I’ve been a little insecure about.”
“I try to speak more clearly in each language,” Hilaria added. “I think that that’s something that I should try to do but sometimes I mess it up and it’s not something that I’m like, playing at, so I want that to be very, very, very clear.”
