“Isn’t it wonderful… to be bilingual?” Apparently not.
Univision anchor María Elena Salinas recently gave a commencement speech at California State University, Fullerton’s College of Communications. Salinas, one of the most recognized faces of Spanish-language media, was addressing students at a college with a large Latino population, which probably explains why she felt comfortable delivering a small portion of her speech in Spanish. Boy was she wrong.
In the video above, you can hear some of the graduates booing the Peabody Award-winning journalist when she mentions Donald Trump in a less than flattering manner. The boos continued when Salinas started doling out life knowledge en español. At one point, you can clearly hear a young lady scream, “Get off the stage!”
Some graduates took to Twitter to condemn their fellow students.
when @MariaESalinas is delivering a beautiful keynote speech at a graduation & racist white people r flipping her off & yelling obscenities
An unnamed UPS delivery driver has been fired after being caught using racist language when delivering a package to a Latino household. The incident occurred on December 17th.
The video, which was caught on a doorbell camera’s security footage, shows a white UPS driver appearing to be angry when delivering a package.
UPDATE: @UPS fires employee caught on camera making racist remarks while delivering a package to a Milwaukee family with a Latino last name. @ForwardLatino says the family wants a direct apology and investments in inclusion training. The latest: https://t.co/4EjkrOU4gN@CBS58pic.twitter.com/Lter1XkQB7
“Now you don’t get f—–g nothing…You can’t read and write and speak the f—–g English language,” he says while writing a “failed to deliver” notice and pasting it on the house’s front door.
The Aviles family says that the footage shows that the UPS worker never even attempted to deliver the package in the first place. He never rang the doorbell or knocked on the door. Based on that, the family has come to the conclusion that the driver intentionally withheld the package from the family out of prejudice and spite
They believe that the only way the driver could’ve known that the family was Latino was by making assumptions based off the name on the package.
“The only information this driver had that could serve as a trigger for this deep-seated hate was the name on the package,” said Forward Latino President Darryl Morin at a press conference addressing the incident.
“So what we have here is a very intentional act to ruin Christmas for somebody, for someone to spew this hateful rhetoric, and quite honestly to deceive their employer,” Morin continued.
Per UPS, the employee has now been fired. “There is no place in any community for racism, bigotry or hate. This is very serious and we promptly took action, terminating the driver’s employment. UPS is wholeheartedly committed to diversity, equity and inclusion,” UPS said in a statement. They also said they contacted the family to apologize.
But the Aviles family is still rattled that such bigoted people are out and about, letting their petty prejudices effect other people’s lives.
“The package was a Christmas gift that we eventually received after Christmas Day, but what if it happened to have time-sensitive content like an epipen or a book I needed to take a final,” said Shirley Aviles, the mother of the man who lives at the address, told NBC News. “I don’t get it. It’s just sad.”
Aviles seemed disturbed about what this incident says about human nature. “This is about the things people do when they think no one is watching them. That’s important because that’s when you see people’s true colors and that’s what’s scary,”
On December 21, 2020, journalist and podcaster Tracie Egan Morrissey opened a jar of worms that caused a massive stir. In a post shared to her Instagram Story, Morrissey shared a string of posts that examined the accent of author, and yoga instructor Hilaria Baldwin (wife to Alec Baldwin), and her alleged claims of Spanish heritage. In her post, Morrisey questioned whether or not Baldwin has misrepresented her ethnic and cultural background.
Since, Baldwin, who was not born in Spain and does not come from a Spanish family, but one from Massachusetts, has been forced to explain herself.
In a post shared to Twitter, Morrissey commented on Baldwin’s “decade-long grift” of impersonating a Spanish person.
“You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person,” Twitter user @lenibriscoe remarked at the top of a long thread that quickly went viral.
According to Page Six, Baldwin’s bio on her agency’s site claims that “Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” In 2018, Hola! magazine described Hilaria as “born in Spain” and noting that Spanish is her native language. @lenibriscoe shared that in interviews from her earlier days of her marriage to actor Alec Baldwin Hilaria Baldwin spoke with a Spanish accent and, in one case, seemed to forget the English word for “cucumber.”
Users pointed out that in an April interview with Cat and Nat of the MomTruths podcast, Baldwin claimed to have “moved here when [she] was 19 to go to NYU.” When asked where she’d moved from, Baldwin noted From — my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca.”
After being called out for faking an accent, Hilaria has had to clarify previous assumptions about her heritage.
It is true in fact that Baldwin’s parents live in Mallorca, and according to “Page Six,” they have resided there since 2011. Before that, however, they lived in Massachusetts. According to CUT, Twitter investigators sleuths “dug up the following footage of Kathryn Hayward (‘formerly an internist at the Massachusetts General Hospital’) on what looks like her website, speaking about her upbringing in Longmeadow, as well as Baldwin’s paternal grandfather’s obituary, which states that the Thomas ‘family presence in … Vermont predated the American Revolution.’ Baldwin’s grandfather’s professional travel to Argentina reportedly inspired his children to ‘become proficient in the Spanish language.’”
Strangely, however, if you search “where was Hilaria Baldwin born” on Google it shows a map of Mallorca. Hilaria’s IMDb bio states that “Hilaria Baldwin was born on January 6, 1984 in Mallorca, Spain as Hilaria Lynn Thomas.” School mates of Hilaria have noted that when she was younger she went by the name Hilary.
Recently, Hilaria responded to the questions in a post shared to Instagram.
Hilaria admitted that “there’s some stuff that needs to be clarified,” but said that her words were twisted in previous media appearances. She admitted that she was “born in Boston” and claimed to be “a different kind of Bostonian” one who lived“some of [her] childhood in Spain… There was a lot of back-and-forth my entire life, and I’m really lucky that I grew up speaking two languages,” Hilaria explained that her accent changes depending on the language she speaks more often. “When I tried to work, I try to enunciate a little bit more, but when I get nervous or upset, then I start to mix the two.”
When it comes to her name, Baldwin says that she used the name Hillary in the U.S. and Hilaria in Spain. “My parents, they call me Hilaria, my whole family call me Hilaria,” she remarked. “It’s the same name, just a few letters different, so I think we shouldn’t be so upset about it,” she said. “And whatever you guys want to call me, I will respond to both.”
So far, fans have yet to determine if Baldwin’s claims actually hold water. We’ll see if her insistence that she is not to blame for the misconceptions about her heritage works for her moving forward.
