Bruno Mars – a superstar with (some) Hungarian ancestry

Bruno Mars has Hungarian ancestry? Hard to believe, but the fact is that the pop-superstar has a bit of Hungarian in him, a Hungarian Jewish grandmother on his father’s side. Here is the story.

At the Grammies

Peter Gene Hernandez aka. Bruno Mars was born in 1985 in Honolulu, Hawaii into a family of musicians and dancers. His beloved mother, Bernadette San Pedro Bayot died relatively young. She was from the Philippines and arrived to Hawaii as a child.

With his mother getting his driver lice.nse at age 18

His father, Brooklyn-born Peter Hernandez, is a percussionist from the Big Apple and he is Hungarian on his mother’s side. Bruno’s paternal grandfather was from Puerto Rico. In New York he married a Hungarian Jewish woman who hailed from Kárpátalja, today Zakarpatia, Ukraine. This region before WWI belonged to the Hungarian Kingdom and the Jews of the area spoke Hungarian and Yiddish.

Little Peter was a natural showman from an early age. As a child he made money as an Elvis impersonator. His father gave him the nickname Bruno because he thought that the boy resembled his hero, pro-wrestler Bruno Sammartino. Bruno later decided to change his last name to Mars. He felt that he wanted to be an extremely good, “out of this world” musician, so he might as well be from Mars. At least that is the explanation I read.

With his father as Elvis impersonator.

Bruno has won seven Grammies and given concerts in Budapest. He doesn’t speak Hungarian and his close-knit family, are all in the music business.

Budapest concert poster

Here is Bruno Mars’s “classic” Uptown Funk which already has 3.5B (yes billion) YouTube viewers.

György Lázár