Almost a month after Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted to fathering a child with his Guatemalan housekeeper, Hello! magazine published Mildred Baena's story in her own words. The June 14 article marked the first time Baena spoke to the press. During her weeks in hiding, however, speculation about the former California governor's mistress was not only caustic but also racially tinged.
In May, Baena's daughter Jackie Rozo blamed Baena's ethnic background for the media frenzy that followed the news that her mother and action star Schwarzenegger shared a child. "It's just a big thing because she's Hispanic, and he's a celebrity," Rozo told Spanish language network Telemundo.
Clearly, the Guatemalan heritage of Baena is far from the only reason the press has tracked this story relentlessly. There's also the fact that the paternity of her son Joseph was kept hidden for years--from the public and presumably from Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver. In addition, the revelation gave more weight to the claims of women who'd accused Schwarzenegger of sexual impropriety during his 2003 gubernatorial campaign.
While the reasons the media has taken interest in the scandal vary, Rozo is right that race factors into it. In an age when Latinos in the U.S. face more bias than ever, thanks to anti-immigrant sentiment, many of the remarks made about Baena on the Web--from celebrity news site TMZ.com to the African-American gossip site Bossip--have a racist bent. Wrote one TMZ.com commenter:
"HELLO? TMZ?? IS THIS WOMAN ILLEGAL??? Hope you are checking that out?"
Wrote another: "That...big nosed MESSYCAN maid isn't fit to be in Maria's house."
And on Bossip, a reader complained that Baena "went from slave immigrant to living better than some middle cl.a.s.s educated ppl."
But it's not just anonymous commenters, well known for unleashing racism in droves on the Internet, making such remarks. Even TMZ.com's coverage of the situation turned racial, with the site running a story on how Baena thinks "white is right," as the old expression goes.
"She was a 'self-hating woman' who would tell members of the staff that 'white people were better' and she did whatever she could to become friendly with Caucasians," TMZ reported.
Sounds like a convenient way to call Baena the Latina equivalent of an Uncle Tom. Also, this tale about Baena and her coworkers is reminiscent of Malcolm X's speech about the difference between field and house slaves in which he noted, "The house negro always looked out for his master...and he loved his master more than his master loved himself."
It's impossible to know what kind of identity politics Baena has. The fact that she kept her son's paternity a secret for so long signals that she may have been loyal to Schwarzenegger, but such loyalty may very well have nothing to do with race. As an immigrant woman of color who worked as a domestic, Baena simply may have feared that she'd be jobless or otherwise jeopardized if the identity of her son's father got out.
"Geraldo Rivera actually portrays her as this loving woman who held on to this secret because she loved him so much," Nevada State College Professor Gwen Sharp of the website Sociological Images told me. Sharp teaches courses on race, gender and sexuality. "What's amazing is how much the power dynamic is hidden here. We're missing the fact that it's employee-employer relationship. You've got an immigrant housekeeper and the governor of the state."
Not only have media outlets failed to comment on the power imbalance between Baena and Schwarzenegger, they've also described the latter as a seductress who used her feminine wiles to ensnare the governor. Baena began to "pursue Arnold" in the late 1990s, TMZ.com reported. It's Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson all over again--at least how they're portrayed in popular culture. But just how Hemings, who in addition to being a slave was much younger than Jefferson, likely did not seduce Jefferson, it's improbable that Schwarzenegger began an affair with his housekeeper because he couldn't fend off her advances.
Although women of color in particular have been portrayed throughout history as sexually voracious Jezebels, Sharp said that women of all backgrounds are oft presented as having sexual power over men. This notion lets men off the hook when they behave sexually irresponsibly.
"We're willing to say men are tempted by evil women rather than men in power have misused their power to have sex with women at the bottom. Women have such amazing sexual power over men that men just can't control themselves."
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