Column: Are we asking the right questions about Hilaria Baldwin?

Language is inextricably linked to identity and expressions of authenticity. How we speak becomes a signifier of who we are, or who we want to be. Perhaps no one is exemplifying this publicly right now more than Hilaria Baldwin.

A video of Baldwin cooking a Spanish tortilla went viral this month after the fitness influencer, yoga instructor and, most famously, wife of actor Alec Baldwin with whom she has seven children, struggled to recall the English word for thebolla — a repeat performance of a similar moment from 2020.

This type of vocab blip is commonplace with any Spanish speaker, native or otherwise. But Baldwin is a special case considering she has long been accused of running a years-long grift impersonating a Spaniard. The 41-year-old was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas to American parents in Boston, and went by Hillary up until 2009, calling into question her thick Spanish accent that tends to be less pronounced at times. It’s hard to not think there’s something sketchy in the paella.

Although interrogating Baldwin online to prove a substantial connection to Spain feels like a worthy, even delicious cause, Latinos (like, actual Latinos, not merely Hispanics) can perhaps use the moment to admit something about ourselves and how we value language, race and ethnicity. Hear me out!

Dr. Itxaso Rodriguez-Ordóñez is a professor of linguistics at Cal State Long Beach who comes from the Basque Country, and whose research focuses on bilingualism and social linguistics. The videos she’s seen of Baldwin speaking led her to conclude that she was not from Spain. But, she adds, verifying such details is “a clickbait discussion.”

“The question that we should be asking is: What is she trying to accomplish with this? What is her purpose?” she says. “Whether it’s deliberate or not, we know that at least from a social linguistic standpoint, that it’s strategic what she’s doing.”

Baldwin has chosen to (allegedly!) pretend to be a Spaniard or inflate a tenuous connection. She re-authenticates this assertion in the video with casual mentions of the tortilla recipe being from her childhood and continues to use an accented “cebolla” even when she’s given the word “onion.” Why ask for the word if she wasn’t ever going to use it? In more simple terms, she’s trying way too hard to be Penelope Cruz but comes off more like that girl from college who studied a semester in Barthelona.

Although she presents an extreme case, one drenched in white privilege, cultural appropriation and general weirdness, the way Latino culture itself values a Eurocentric Latinidad or Hispanidad has led us to perpetual harm.

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Dr. Jonathan Rosa, a professor in the anthropology, linguistics and comparative literature departments at Stanford University, said Baldwin exemplifies a shallow performance of diversity that benefits some and not others.

“What’s so galling about this is the way that, for many U.S. Latinos, Spanish has been a site of stigmatization and, frankly, continues to be,” Rosa added. “And yet, for this elite Bostonian white woman, Spanish becomes a platform for repositioning herself as this cosmopolitan figure. So it’s just interesting to see for whom these language practices become objects of stigma, and for whom they become sites for the cultivation of cultural value.”

As Rodriguez-Ordóñez and Rosa point out, if Baldwin is lying, she didn’t choose to fake a Guatemalan, Mexican or Honduran nationality. If a white person were to choose a Hispanic nationality to impersonate, wouldn’t it be most strategic to choose one that’s assigned more value in a white supremacist culture?

Whether Baldwin’s Spanish identity is “real” or not, she gains notoriety, career opportunities, money and access to all that celebrity has to offer just by playing with the mystery. That she has a reality series about her family life premiering on TLC next month is wholly unsurprising. The privilege she already has as a white woman from a wealthy, prominent family is bolstered by a cultural capital she is granting herself that is born of racism, colorism and classism.

This stands in contrast to another moment where Spanish took center stage for individuals who have recently had their grasp of the language discoursed to death online and their authenticity as Latinas questioned — Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and their work in the controversial musical “Emilia Pérez.”

At this year’s Golden Globes, Saldaña accepted the award for best supporting actress in a comedy or musical and peppered her speech with Spanish as well as Spanish pronunciations. She said not only Gomez’s name in accented Spanish, but also those of Ariana Grande (who is of Italian heritage) and Isabella Rossellini (also Italian).

Although I initially watched cynically, seeing it as an ethnic overperformance to prove Latinx bona fides in the face of controversy over both the film and hers and Gomez’s grasp of Mexican Spanish, it dawned on me that Saldaña probably has had to prove herself all her life as an Afro Latina. For years she didn’t use the ñ in her name — something that appears to have been imposed on her and which she has reclaimed in recent years.

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Even though she applied an accent on names that don’t require it, like Grande’s, using Spanish and pronouncing names with an accent on such a large platform and in a room that often denies Latinx people opportunities in the industry can be viewed as taking back something that was denied to her for so long as a Dominican Black woman.

Although it’s infuriating for any Latino who has been shamed or discriminated against for their relationship to the Spanish language to see someone, like Baldwin, seemingly play in our faces, Rosa argues that it’s not surprising in a society where whiteness determines value, influences what our access to Spanish looks like and which type of Spanish is considered worth knowing. We’re not learning Dominican Spanish in school! And that’s a shame because it would help me personally understand more reggaetón songs.

Still, Rosa argues that it’s important to not exceptionalize Baldwin because, in truth, it’s not uncommon for Latinos to lean into a European heritage they may or may not have an actual close connection to. When we mention a great-grandfather who was from Madrid, or marvel at a relative’s blue eyes as proof of a French lineage, or flex on a 4% Portuguese DNA result on 23AndMe, what are we aligning ourselves with if not a Eurocentric whiteness aimed at erasing indigeneity?

You may not be out here dropping “thebollas” in conversation, but there’s still an upholding of Europe as the ideal that permeates Latino culture.

Our relationship to language is tied to so much about ourselves, and though Baldwin is the most unhinged example of where cultural value is assigned around the Spanish language, we should remember that we can, and should, decide where that value is given.

Alex Zaragoza is a television writer and journalist covering culture and identity. Her work has appeared in Vice, NPR, Bloomberg and Teen Vogue. She’s written on the series “Primo” and “Lopez v. Lopez” and is developing a series based on her upbringing in Tijuana and San Diego.