The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (12 page)

The education I was getting was a street education—I can see now that my view of people and of spirituality began from that experience. I started at the lowest level and learned to always watch out, because people would try to make me less than they were if I
let them, try to shame me or guilt-trip me, then pay me less or not at all. I started to see that people put each other on different levels, looking down on someone or looking up to someone, and take advantage of that situation. It was the beginning of the way I look at things today—I don’t allow anyone to have superiority over me and try not to let anyone have inferiority under me. I was talking with another musician one night, explaining that I did not want to have to look up to anybody. “Not even God?” he asked. I was ready for that. By then I had been thinking a lot about God—my answer had the kind of conviction my mom had about religion.

“God doesn’t like to look down on anyone. Why should we?” I said. Even then in Tijuana I felt that was true and that it was important to realize it on a spiritual level and implement it on a street level.

I was in Tijuana for just seven years. For everyone, the years from eight to fifteen are when we grow up the most, when we become aware of the world around us. We start asking questions we will be asking again and again the rest of our lives. It was at that age when I first began to work and to play music. It was also when I went from G.I. Joe to “Where’s Rosa?”

First there was Linda Wong, from my neighborhood. She was like a teenage Sophia Loren, and she was my first big crush, but nothing happened. I was still figuring out how to talk to girls, but that started me thinking. There was a party one time with all the musicians and girls from El Convoy at Rosarito Beach, which is between Tijuana and Ensenada. We had drinks and the radio on, and Ray Charles was singing, “One of these days and it won’t be long…” Everyone paired up, and I could tell the girl I was with was disappointed she had to hang with this little kid. Still, she let me sneak a kiss. Then there was Rosa, who lived next door and would let me kiss her while we were hiding in the bushes. She didn’t let me go any further.

Having these experiences as a teenager got me to thinking
about women, especially when I saw the girls who were stripping for money showing up at the church where I was playing the violin. It would be Sunday morning, and four or five of the women I just saw naked a few hours earlier were there. They had on nice, modest dresses and were with their small children, the girls dressed in little white socks and ribbons in their hair, the boys in their little suits. I began to realize that they had to do what they did to feed their kids, that they had little choice, and how hard it was for them in a culture that looked down on women for doing those kinds of things. I would talk to them, and they would tell me that they couldn’t go home because their parents for whatever reason would not let them back in.

I began to look at women with a different eye. I had a conversation with one of the bouncers at El Convoy—this big thug who was always teasing me and pulling my hair. We were eating at the back of the joint in the place they had for employees, and this guy was pissed off at something. Or at everything. He was talking and talking about this and that, and he finally made some hateful comment about women in general—“They’re all fucking whores!”

I don’t know why, but I had to ask, “You mean all of them?”

“Yeah, to me, all of them!”

I kept going. “Does that mean your mother, too?” Silence. “And your sister?” He slowly turned to me. “Man, I could kill you.” The only other person in the room was the woman who was cooking, and she looked at me as if I were crazy.

I had heard that kind of talk before from men. I’ve heard women speak about men the same way—“All men are dogs”—and that’s not right, either.

But what the bouncer dude said was so negative and filled with so much anger that I couldn’t just accept it. I had to say something. He threatened me, and I played it innocent. “Hey, I just wanted to know if you really meant all of them.” He looked straight ahead and finished his food.

That left a tone in my head—not to judge women but to appreciate them. Not to judge people because of what they do in order to
live and survive. As I grew up I tried to approach the sexual drive with dignity and grace. Years later, when we moved to San Francisco, I would be up early walking to work at a diner and there’d be a line of guys trying to pick me up in the Castro. And I’d say, “No; I don’t do that, man.” I got to understand how women feel when they walk through the streets and a bunch of guys are looking at their bodies and saying whatever. You feel like prey.

Since then my perception has been that the relationship between men and women is always a work in progress.

One day at El Convoy I ran into one of the substitute teachers from my school. He looked a lot like Barack Obama, now that I think about it, and he was a great storyteller. He told us a tale about a poor woman who had found some burning embers in her stove to keep herself warm during the night, and the glowing coals turned out to be the eyes of a big cat. Not sure what lesson we were supposed to learn from that, but I liked the story and I liked him, so when I saw him at the club with his arms wrapped around one of the girls there, I said, “Hey, Teach!” He jumped away from the girl like she was one of those hot coals. “Carlos, what are you doing here?”

“I work here, man. What are
you
doing here?”

By summer of 1962, those two parts of my life just didn’t balance out anymore. It had not been easy playing music and going to school at the same time, so I eventually dropped out. My life with my family wasn’t balancing, either. My hours were getting longer at El Convoy—from 4:00 p.m. to midnight on weeknights, and on weekends from opening time till the customers left. Meanwhile my dad was back in San Francisco again and had Jorge with him. Tony had found migrant work up in Stockton—an hour east of the Bay Area—picking artichokes and peaches. Soon my sisters would follow, too. As my mom had done in Autlán, she was still thinking El Norte—and as before, it was her decision to go. There was no discussion. But I was older by then, and I wasn’t ready.

Avenida Revolución, Tijuana, looking north toward the US border, 1964.

As soon as you left Tijuana and crossed the border, you would see humongous color billboards on which happy, smiling faces were selling houses and cars. Then you could drive to nice, clean supermarkets that had freezers, and everything was sparkling—no flies or funky smells, as there were back in Mexico. My mom and I used to talk about how good it would be to live in America. For her and the rest of my family, it was about a better way of life, like the one those billboards advertised. But what eventually made me want to go north was the sound of black America—blues and R & B. I wanted to be closer to that, marinate my spirit in that music.

When we finally moved north, my family and I discovered that in the middle of all this affluence there were these intense pockets of conflict. Between rich and poor, between black, white, and brown. You had to watch out when you went two blocks in this or that direction, because there were ignorant, angry people living there who didn’t like your kind, the way you talked, or the way you dressed. It can start in high school, but it really shouldn’t even make it to that point.

I love being in the United States because it gives me a chance to say what I want to say. I realize in many places in the world that’s not possible. The reason I speak my mind is because I see what’s wrong and what can be better in this country. I think life is hard enough, and most people don’t get that much unless they fight for it or get lucky or are born lucky. That’s the true picture of America—not the idea of foreigners coming in and taking away this and that from Americans. My family moved here for a better life, because America is the land of opportunity—which means not only the opportunity to make something of yourself but also the opportunity to give back. I would never take anything from America that I wouldn’t want to put back a hundred times. The majority of foreigners who come to this country, I believe, are like that.

I think the main problem is that people are afraid that other people will take away what is their fair share. You know that line of Billie Holiday’s—“You can help yourself / But don’t take too much”? That song, “God Bless the Child,” should be up there with the national anthem and sung just as often. Those two songs next to each other would be perfect—the dream of America and the truth of America.

You want to talk about taking more than a fair share? Look at America and the world today. No country has ever been richer or more powerful than America is now. That’s a fact. No country gives away more than America does, and at the same time no country demands more from the rest of the world. What Rome was in the time of Jesus, America is today. As it says in the Bible, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. America takes what it wants, and it says that this is the right thing to do, without looking at the consequences.

M
y father was the advance scout for the family—he was the first to check out San Francisco around 1960, playing for a few months, then coming back. By the following year, he found steady work at the Latin American Club in the city’s Mission District—not connected to the Club Latino Americano in Tijuana. With the help of the club’s owner, Tony Mares, he put together one of San Francisco’s first serious mariachi bands, recruiting from the Bay Area and Tijuana if necessary. Like they had done in Mexico, my dad’s group played weddings and other important functions and got real busy. The Mexican community in San Francisco was growing fast at that point. He got tight with Tony and his wife, and they eventually became our sponsors, helping us come to America.

My mom’s decision to move was a gradual thing, with lots of steps involved in preparation—my sister Irma remembers my father getting us English lessons from a private instructor in Tijuana. My mom went to San Francisco at one point to babysit the Mares’s children for a few months and to help take care of their house—to be their Chepa, in other words.

I’m sure that’s when my mom made up her mind. San Francisco can get in your veins, because it’s beautiful in a way that San Diego and Los Angeles are not. She saw Golden Gate Park and got to visit other places in the city. To my mom, Los Angeles looked like Tijuana, only more crowded. San Francisco had the bridge and the bay and the hills. It had neighborhoods next door to each other with international people and flavors—Chinatown, Japantown, the Italian section. In some ways it was the world, not just America.

Tony was next to start crossing the border, around 1961. He went from being a mechanic in Mexico to working on a farm in California. He told me it was the hardest work he’d ever done in his life—up at dawn, bending over for the whole day until he collapsed every night from exhaustion, doing it again the next day, and sending what little money he got to Mom.

My mom and dad had a plan for the whole family, and in 1962
they started to put it into action—there was no stopping them. They saved up as much money as they could, and my dad started to work on finding a place for us in San Francisco. My mom told us what was happening, and my sisters complained—they were teenagers, young adults. Some had boyfriends by then. For me, it was like I had already joined the circus. I had already checked out of the family stuff—doing chores and going to school and being a normal kid. I was out every night, playing the blues and watching women take off their clothes.

My mom’s attitude was, you can come with me to San Francisco or stay, but I’m going. Except for me, no one would choose to stay. The pull of the family was strong—stronger than any of the boyfriends were.

Meanwhile my mom started to work on the immigration papers to get us to the United States. She found a blind woman in Tijuana who had a typewriter and set up shop in the plaza near the Our Lady of Guadalupe cathedral. She had done the same thing for many Mexican families, so she had the routine down—being blind didn’t matter. “What’s your father’s name?… Mother’s name?… How many children?… Sponsor?” I remember it was my money from El Convoy that went directly to that woman to get the forms done.

My mother signed the documents and delivered them to the American government office. First my dad and Jorge went up north in the middle of the summer in 1962, staying in a small room above the Latin American Club. Jorge told me that one day Mr. Mares came to the door and told him he had to come downstairs and clean the place. He’d sweep and wax the floors, and at night he’d cry himself to sleep listening to our dad’s violin and not knowing where his family was. He was just ten at the time! Around the end of spring, Tony joined them, then Laura and Irma came up from Tijuana, and finally my mom came with Leticia and Maria—closing down our last house in Mexico, on Calle Quinta, and everyone together in that little flat above the nightclub in San Francisco.

I held out till the end of summer, playing at El Convoy. I stayed
at a place close to downtown with a cousin of my mom’s. I gave them money for food and for washing my clothes, and I wasn’t really there that much. It was basically just room and board, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. I liked what I had in Tijuana—the music, the gig, playing blues and R & B, getting it together on guitar.

Then my mom came back from San Francisco with Tony to get me, and that was that—no argument or discussion. I had to go. As before, my birthday marked a major move in my life. I had just turned fifteen, and there I was in a car, crossing the border into San Diego, then making the long, straight drive up I-5 to San Francisco. The trip was much shorter than the one from Autlán—it was only a ten-hour drive back then, one long day. The roads in the United States were so much better than they were in Mexico, too—smooth and fast. I remember eating ketchup and Ritz crackers so we had enough gas money to make it.

There was not much in San Francisco in 1962 to change the fact that I wasn’t happy. Not at first, anyway. I went from working as a full-time musician on the street to being a full-time student in the local junior high school—James Lick Junior High on Noe Street. Plus they held me back a year because I didn’t speak English well enough, so I was in classes with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. I had been hanging around with dudes who were in their twenties and thirties, playing songs like “Stormy Monday Blues.” Suddenly it was back to kiddie shit, and the music of the day was Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, all this surf music, and I didn’t even swim.

As we had in Tijuana, we started moving from one place to another almost immediately. We went from living above the club where my dad was playing to a funky little apartment on 3rd Street and Bryant in what was essentially the black ghetto, next to the American Can Company—an area they call China Basin.

We all had it tough at the start—lots and lots of tears. When the ’62 school year started, suddenly all us kids had to learn how to get to school, how to make new friends, and we had to do it all in
English. My dad sat down with each of us, gave us just enough money for the bus, and explained the bus routes. “I’m only telling you once—you take this number bus and get off at that street, and take this other bus and change to this other bus.” We were all scared and confused. Irma and Leticia got totally lost on their first day. Jorge and Maria only had to go down the block, since they were in elementary school—but they got teased for being Mexican. They didn’t understand: the last time they were in school, everyone was Mexican! Jorge, who had never really seen a black kid’s hair before, made the mistake of touching one boy’s head. Man, he paid for that mistake again and again.

It didn’t help that there was a language and culture gap between us and our neighbors and that there was a new set of street rules to learn. If three or four guys surrounded me on the way to school and wanted my lunch money, I emptied my pockets.

On my first day at James Lick, my pockets were empty anyway, because my mom and I didn’t know that you had to bring money to buy a lunch or that you had to bring food. Come lunchtime, everybody went to the cafeteria. I wasn’t going to ask anyone for food, so I went outside to watch people playing basketball or whatever they were doing. So there I was again—hungry, angry, upset.

A little later, just before we went back to classes, this guy Bruce came strolling by with his two flunkies. They knew I was new, and they started in on me with that “What are you looking at?” stuff. I didn’t need to know English all that well to know what to do. “You want to meet after school?” I said, “
Sí, por qué?
Let’s do this now!” His friend was saying, “Go ahead, Bruce, kick his ass,” like they’re trying to build up the energy or something, and I’m thinking, “What the hell is it with this waiting?”

So I just grabbed him and threw him against the lockers—
bam!
I yelled at him, “Man, I’m going to kick your ass, then I’m going to kick his ass.” Everybody stepped back, going, “Whoa.” Then the teachers came out and separated us, and we went back to class. But right away my reputation was, “That crazy Mexican—don’t
mess with him.” Being grumpy and hungry and angry about being there—that all helped.

We had sized each other up, and the next day Bruce came over and we started talking, and we got to music and he said, “You play?” I told him I played the blues on guitar, and he told me he was into doo-wop. “Oh? What’s that?”

“You know, shoo-be-doo kind of music, like ‘In the Still of the Night.’ ”

I went over to his house to listen to some records, and we became friends. Music got me through all kinds of circumstances.

There were some other good things that happened in those first days in junior high. On the day I stood up to the bully, a girl came up to me and said, “Hi. You’re new here, right? Are you still going to fight Bruce?” Her name was Linda Houston. The boys and girls had different places for recess, and she had heard that this was going to happen. “He’s the biggest bully in school, you know.” So she was warning me a little. A few days before, I had met another girl in the morning assembly—Yvonne Christian—and she turned out to be Linda’s best friend. “So what’s your name?” she asked. I told her.

“Car Antenna?”

“No—Carlos Santana.”

“Oh.”

Linda and Yvonne were around thirteen years old when I met them, and I was fifteen, and that’s a big difference at that age. They were two of the angels who stepped into my life at just the right time to guide me when I needed help. We would become friends for life—not so much in junior high, but in high school we became very tight, and they ended up helping me get more confident with my English and to feel more comfortable in a strange new place.

We’re close friends to this day—it’s amazing how things work out. Their friendship and loyalty has meant more to me than I can really explain without getting sentimental and sloppy. Even when we don’t speak for a few years, when we get back together it’s like
we just hung up the phone an hour ago. Linda’s now married to my old friend Michael Carabello, the original conga player in Santana, and Yvonne doesn’t know it, but a while ago I wrote a song with her in mind that I still have to finish—“Confidential Friend.” Now I guess I’ll have to.