LOS ANGELES >> Growing up as a biracial Black and Filipina musician, singer-songwriter H.E.R. could count on a few things her two cultures shared.

“Filipino Americans love R&B like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. We love hip-hop and we love a really powerful ballad. There’s always music happening,” the 24-year-old born Gabriella Wilson said, two days before presenting at the Academy Awards and a week before she’s up for album of the year at today’s 64th Grammys.

Amid the pressure on the Grammys to better represent the diversity of who makes and listens to pop music today, this year’s nominations showed one notable flowering of that work: it’s the best year for Filipino Americans in Grammy history.

Across top categories, acts with Philippine heritage including Olivia Rodrigo, Saweetie and H.E.R. are up for best new artist and album, song and record of the year prizes. Longtime Grammy favorite Bruno Mars, a multiracial Filipino American who hails from Hawaii, is in contention for four awards with his funk and soul band Silk Sonic, including song and record for “Leave the Door Open.” The Americana singer Elle King, daughter of biracial Filipino American comedian Rob Schneider, is up for country group/duo performance for her duet with Miranda Lambert, “Drunk (and I Don’t Wanna Go Home).” Between them, they have 22 Grammy nominations this year.

All the above acts have multifaceted ethnic backgrounds and arrived at their success through very different genres. For the more than 4 million Filipino Americans in the U.S., it’s a moment in the limelight for a tradition of Asian American music culture that’s often blended into other sounds here.

>> RELATED: Hawaii musicians Daniel Ho and Kalani Pe‘a return as Grammy finalists

“Within the last couple of years, there’s been a groundswell of Filipino American artists who’ve talked about or embraced their Filipino background more than predecessors like Enrique Iglesias or Nicole Scherzinger,” said James Zarsadiaz, director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies program at the University of San Francisco. “Artists have been able to talk more freely about how their Filipino backgrounds shape their perspectives or artistry, because Filipinos have truly permeated ‘mainstream’ American culture and consciousness.”

Filipino American musicians have, over generations, made an impact on U.S. charts. The explosive R&B singer-­dancer Sugar Pie DeSanto toured with James Brown and found national success in the the 1950s and ’60s, and a “Pinoy Rock” movement that riffed on Elvis Presley, American surf and British Invasion sounds became popular in the Philippines at the same time. Broadway performer Lea Salonga was the singing voice for Disney’s Jasmine and Mulan; the Black Eyed Peas’ Apl.De.Ap (born Allan Pineda Lindo) performed on some of the biggest hits of the 2000s, and the actor Darren Criss was a heartthrob on “Glee.”

Mars, born Peter Gene Hernandez in Hawaii to a Puerto Rican father and Filipina mother, gave $100,000 to a hurricane relief fund during a 2013 tour stop in Manila, and said onstage, “I’m so proud and so happy to be Filipino.”

Now that so many Filipino American artists have hit the top rungs of Grammy fame, Zarsadiaz is curious about what the next stages of engagement with that culture will look like. While K-pop arrived in the U.S. over the last decade with an established infrastructure, Filipino musicians in the U.S. were often raised on popular American genres.

While the country’s distinct culinary excellence has flourished in Los Angeles, Zarsadiaz thinks it’s a more complicated path for overtly “Filipino” music to rise here in the way K-pop did.

“K-pop grounded itself as trendy, because there was an aesthetic and fashion and fandom tied to that presentation,” he said. “Filipino Americans, often if they grew up here, were told to embrace an American identity, to assimilate, and part of that was embracing the English language more.

“But what I’ve noticed with singers, when I read interviews, they sprinkle in references about Filipino-­ness,” he continued. “I don’t really see any of those Grammy-­nominated artists doing a Tagalog album anytime soon, but it’s not tied to embarrassment — it’s about having a wide enough consciousness of what it means to be Filipino in America.”

For this year’s Grammy crop, that might mean a ­Tagalog shoutout in an acceptance speech, or other ways to demonstrate “kababayan” (support for fellow Filipinos) while navigating broader trends in American pop music. After Trump and the protests of 2020, many artists feel a fresh urgency to talk about race and how it affects them.

King, who grew up in Ohio, admits that she’s “not very good at making adobo or lumpia; I’m a little Filipina and a whole lot of hillbilly,” she said. But on her first trip to the Philippines recently, “If they know you have any amount of it in you, since I’m the daughter of a well-known Filipino, I felt so welcomed. I played a show there and it made me proud to make it to Manila where my grandma came from.”