Yes. H.E.R., born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson on June 27, 1997, in Vallejo, California, is Filipino American through her mother, who is from Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija. Her father is African American.

What do H.E.R.'s parents do?

H.E.R. has described her parents as working-class people. She told Vogue Philippines in 2023 that her mother is a nurse and her father is a construction worker, and she told Billboard in 2022 that she once planned to study something in the medical field because her mother is a nurse.

What did H.E.R. talk about on The Jennifer Hudson Show?

In her September 2026 appearance, H.E.R. talked with Jennifer Hudson about her Filipino heritage, her DreamWorks Animation film Forgotten Island, and growing up in a musical family. A separate segment tested how many instruments she can play.

Why are so many Filipino Americans nurses?

Historian Catherine Ceniza Choy, in her 2003 book Empire of Care, traces Filipino nurse migration to the American-run hospital training system built during early-twentieth-century U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, not to Philippine independence in 1946 or the 1965 immigration reforms.

Vallejo, CA • September 2026

H.E.R.'s Mom Is a Nurse. Her Dad Built Things. In Vallejo, We Know That House.

On The Jennifer Hudson Show, the Vallejo-born star traced her art back to family and the Philippines. Behind the Oscar is a Filipina nurse from Cabanatuan, a construction worker who introduced her to Curtis Mayfield, and a story thousands of Fil-Am homes already know by heart.

PinoyBuilt zine-collage illustration: a nurse's stethoscope and a construction hard hat hanging side by side on a hook beside a capiz shell window, with an electric guitar leaning below and a single red guitar pick on the floor — PinoyBuilt illustration: a stethoscope, a hard hat, and a guitar by the door of a working Fil-Am house. Not a still from the show.

In my family, the white uniform is practically an heirloom. My mother, Lualhati Reyes Perseveranda, graduated from Mary Johnston Nursing School and worked as a nurse in the United States from 1960 to 1962, a year in Jersey City and a year in Chicago. My sister Joy became a nurse too. Two of my three kids, Veronica and Chesca, chose nursing too. Ask any Fil-Am family in the 707 to count the nurses at the next birthday party and you will need both hands.

So when I started on this piece, Joy added a detail I did not know. Years ago, Gabi Wilson's mom, Agnes, was the secretary in Joy's department. By the time Gabi was talking to Billboard and Vogue Philippines, she was describing her mom as a nurse. Joy remembers her from work. The rest of us know her as the woman beside H.E.R. at the Oscars.

📌 Did You Know?
When H.E.R. covered the OPM classic "Maging Sino Ka Man," Vogue Philippines noted that her version owed as much to the Sharon Cuneta recording as to modern R&B, because her mom is a Sharonian. A Grammy winner raised by a Sharon Cuneta fan from Cabanatuan: of course she knows the song.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day
Aruga — a-ROO-gah
Nurturing care; the tending of someone who depends on you. Pag-aaruga is the act of caregiving, the word for what a mother does at home and what a nurse does on a twelve-hour shift. In a lot of Fil-Am houses, it is the same woman doing both.

What She Told Jennifer Hudson

The episode aired September 25, 2026, the same day Forgotten Island opened in U.S. theaters. H.E.R. sat down with Jennifer Hudson to talk about three things: her Filipino heritage, the DreamWorks Animation film in which she voices Jo opposite Liza Soberano's Raissa, and the musical family that shaped her. A separate segment put her multi-instrumental skills to a playful test, with Hudson asking whether there was any instrument she could not play. Watch the full interview below; the conversation is theirs, and it is worth your time.

Video: "H.E.R. Embracing Her New Era, Playing EVERY Instrument, Shining a Light on Filipino Culture + More!" from The Jennifer Hudson Show, episode aired September 25, 2026. Embedded from YouTube; all rights belong to the show.

This piece is a video commentary, the format PinoyBuilt opened with The Boat We All Came In: we write about the video, not a transcript of it. What the interview gives us is the frame. What fills the frame is a story H.E.R. has been telling, interview by interview, for years.

A Nurse and a Construction Worker

Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson was born in Vallejo on June 27, 1997, to an African American father and a Filipina mother from Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija. She has never dressed up where she comes from. In her 2023 cover story for Vogue Philippines, she put it plainly:

"They're working-class people—my mom's a nurse, my dad's a construction worker."
H.E.R., to Vogue Philippines, 2023

A year earlier, accepting Billboard's Women in Music Impact honor, she admitted she almost did not become H.E.R. at all. After high school there was pressure to go to college, and she planned to study something in the medical field, because her mom is a nurse. Every Fil-Am kid with a guitar and a dream knows that conversation. She chose the guitar, but she understood exactly why the conversation was being had.

The same Vogue Philippines story followed her back to the Philippines. On a 2019 trip she saw the house her mother lived in as a child, the home of her grandparents, and the market her mom used to go to in Cabanatuan, which she called the tricycle capital of the world. That is a balikbayan sentence. It is also the sentence of a daughter who has been listening to her mother's stories her whole life.

From Dad's music to a director's chair

The construction worker's side of the house left its own mark. When "Fight for You," from Judas and the Black Messiah, won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Original Song, H.E.R. dedicated the win to her Filipino mother, who was with her at the ceremony, and thanked her father at home for introducing her to Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye. "They paid off," she said, as the Inquirer reported.

They paid off twice. Film producer Peter Afterman was in the room for that speech. He approached her afterward with an idea, and she ended up directing The Makings of Curtis Mayfield, which premiered at SXSW in Austin in March 2025. What a father shared at home became his daughter's directorial debut. That is how culture moves through a working family: not through lessons that cost money, but through what is playing in the house.

Add it up and the résumé is absurd for a 29-year-old: an Oscar, a Children's and Family Emmy for the Netflix series We the People, and five Grammys, including 2021 Song of the Year for "I Can't Breathe." She is a Tony away from EGOT. And she is still, unmistakably, a kid from our city.

Why So Many of Our Moms Wear Scrubs

Here is the question underneath H.E.R.'s story, and underneath mine: why is the Filipina nurse so common that she is practically a Fil-Am archetype? The easy answer is opportunity. The truer answer starts earlier, and it starts with power.

The empire behind the uniform. UC Berkeley historian Catherine Ceniza Choy, in her 2003 book Empire of Care, argues that Filipino nurse migration did not begin with Philippine independence in 1946 or with the 1965 loosening of U.S. immigration law. It began with the Americanized hospital training system the United States built during its early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Nursing schools in the Philippines taught an American curriculum as part of a colonial project to "civilize" Filipinos. The pipeline that later carried women like my mother to American hospitals was laid down by the empire that ran the islands.

That history does not make the nurses any less heroic. It makes their choices legible. They took a profession designed to serve someone else's idea of who Filipinos should be, mastered it, and turned it into homes, tuition, and remittances on both sides of the Pacific. That is agency under terms they did not set, which is the whole Fil-Am story in one job title.

And the bill came due in 2020. When COVID-19 hit, National Nurses United counted the registered nurses who had died of the virus and related complications. The numbers, through September 16, 2020:

Measure	Figure
Registered nurse deaths counted	213
Filipino nurses among them	67 (31.5%)
Filipino share of all U.S. RNs	About 4%
Nurses of color among the deaths	58.2%

Four percent of the workforce. Nearly a third of the dead. Behind those numbers were women who looked exactly like the tita who brought pancit to your graduation. Every Fil-Am family with a nurse in it lived that year with one question at the door: what is she bringing home tonight?

Vallejo Is a Small Town

Vallejo has been a Filipino town since the Mare Island shipyard years that Mel Orpilla documents. It is a place where a sister's old coworker turns out to be an Oscar winner's mother, and nobody finds that strange. That is kapwa in practice. The famous and the unfamous share the same hospital hallways, the same parishes, the same grocery lines.

Which is why I find H.E.R.'s openness so moving. For years she let an acronym, Having Everything Revealed, go first. Now she is on national television talking about her Filipino heritage, about her family, about a film built from the creatures our lolas used to warn us about. As I wrote in the Forgotten Island box-office piece, she told Reuters that the creature her own mother kept coming back to, in the folktales she told, was the manananggal. Back in March, in The Memory Heist, I argued the film is really about what the diaspora forgets. H.E.R. is the proof of what it can remember.

Back to the White Uniform

The nurse moms of our community rarely get the spotlight. They work the night shift, they come home, and they tell stories about aswang and manananggal to kids who will grow up to make movies about them. One of them, from Cabanatuan by way of Vallejo, raised a daughter who now sits across from Jennifer Hudson and talks about her Filipino heritage with pride, on national television.

My mother wore that uniform. My sister worked beside Agnes Wilson. My daughters are following them into the same profession. So when the world sees H.E.R., I hope it sees the whole house: the stethoscope by the door, the hard hat next to it, the guitar in the corner, and the stories at bedtime. That is what built her. It is what built a lot of us.

Follow H.E.R.: 📷 Instagram @hermusicofficial 🌐 her-official.com

Watch the Interview: ▶ The Jennifer Hudson Show on YouTube

Sources

← Previous H.E.R. Story: Critics Loved Forgotten Island

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Founder & Editor

J.F.R. Perseveranda

J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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