The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (5 page)

It was almost like Dad was trying to get rid of us: “Here’s some money for rent and maybe buy a stove or something.” My mom took the letter to the middle of town, where all the cab drivers hung around. She knew a guy named Barranquilla, who was close to my dad. She told him that she had received a letter from José telling her to give Barranquilla some money to drive the family up to Tijuana. “He told me to pay you half and that he’ll pay you the rest and more when you get us there. Take this money and pick us up on Sunday, okay?”

Of course, Barranquilla thought this was weird, since my dad never said anything to him. He asked to read the letter. My mom acted as if he were out of his mind. “No! You can’t read this—you crazy? There’s personal stuff in here!”

So this is Thursday or Friday. My mom started selling off everything she could—furniture, whatever we had. She got together a little bit of food and money for the trip, enough to pay for the gasoline. On Sunday, she got us all up and made sure we were washed, dressed, and looking good. Barranquilla brought the car around, and it was like a big tank—one of those big American sedans you smelled before you saw. My sisters, brothers, and I—our eyes were really big, wondering. “Where are we going, Mom?”

“We’re going to your dad,” she said. I think only Tony and Laura knew before that morning that we were leaving.

My mother put my four sisters, my brothers, Chepa, the dog, and me in the car, got in, and said,
“Nos vamos.”
It was five thirty in the morning. We were heading for a man we hadn’t seen in a year. We had enough money for a one-way trip and no guarantee we
would find him. I remember looking out the back window and watching the town get smaller. We headed east out of town. West would have taken us to the coast, and the east road went for a while and then forked. One way went to Guadalajara, and the other way went left, toward El Norte. That was the road that led to all sorts of possibilities, the promise of a good life—El Norte. Tijuana? Who cared that it was on the Mexican side of the border? To my mom, Tijuana
was
America. We were going to join Dad, and we were going to America. That was the road we took.

Me in grade school, 1954.

In Tijuana, very early in the morning, when the sun was just coming up, I would walk to school. Just outside of town I would see a line of people—
Indios,
mestizos—walking like they were in some religious procession, going up into the hills, where they could get red clay. They’d take chunks of clay home, where they’d mix it with water and shape it into two-feet-high figurines, about as tall as from your elbow to the end of your fingers. They’d let them dry, then paint them white and add other details, and there! You’d have the Virgin of Guadalupe—the
patron saint of all Mexicans. She would look really beautiful by the time they were done.

They’d take the statues into town to sell to tourists or anyone near the cathedral in downtown Tijuana—Our Lady of Guadalupe. Or they’d walk between the cars in the middle of the road, the way they sell oranges and stuff like that. People would buy the statues, take them home, put flowers or candles on them, and start praying from the heart to these little figures. Who’s to say whether their prayers were answered? Just days before, they had been nothing more than some red clay up in those hills.

When I arrived in Tijuana, I was a Mexican kid like so many others. I was just raw material, man. I didn’t have much hope to go anywhere or get any higher than I was. Everything that I became began to crystallize in that border town—becoming a musician and becoming a man. Miles Davis used to compliment me in a way he understood. “You’re not the little Mexican who walks around with his tail between his legs apologizing for being Mexican and asking permission to get a driver’s license.” That kind of validation and approval has meant more to me than anything.

Here’s something else Miles told me: “I’m more than just a little guy playing some blues.” I feel the same way. I’m all the animals in the zoo, not just the penguins. I’m all the races, not just Mexican. The more I develop spiritually, the less nationalistic I am about Mexico, the United States, or anywhere else.

I am sure a lot of people get pissed off. “You’re forgetting your roots. You’re not a Mexican anymore.” But I am still working out my own identity, crystallizing my existence, so that I can be more consistent in saying I am proud to be a human being on this planet, no matter what language I am speaking or what country is collecting taxes from me. I came from the light, and I’m going to return to the light.

Those statues of the Virgin had a very special look to them—you could recognize them right away. After Santana hit it big and we began to tour the world, I would come across those Virgins in America and in Europe—even once in Japan. Somebody had been to Tijuana and bought one and brought it home. It was like seeing an old friend again.

T
he trip from Autlán to Tijuana took place in August of 1955, just after my birthday, and we traveled for almost five days. It took a long time to get there because not all the roads were paved. I remember that each of those days felt like a week. It was hot, and we were cramped against each other in the car, and it didn’t get much better when we stopped. Barranquilla was crabby and grumpy, complaining the whole time. My mom would say, “I ain’t got time for that, you know? Take it up with José.”

There weren’t any hotels or motels along the way, and even if there had been, we didn’t have money for anything but gas. We slept in the desert under the stars, worried about scorpions and snakes. The food ran out. So every time we stopped somewhere, Mom would try to buy something that we could eat. We had to eat at truck stops, where the food was horrible. I have never smelled or tasted beans that were so rancid. How can somebody screw up beans? I still can’t understand that—it’s like messing up granola. There were these ugly frijoles, and we kids were getting sick left and right. So we drank a lot of Kern’s canned juices. I can still taste that sandpaperlike sap. To this day I don’t want to see another one of those juices ever again.

I can still hear the music from the radio on that trip—especially Pedro Vargas. He had the baddest trumpet players at the time—they could play high and clean, like Mexicans. All his songs were romantic. What they were really about was sex.

We came to a big river, and we had to put the car on a raft that was just a bunch of planks. Then people would pull the rope from the other shore to get us across. I remember Barranquilla told us there had been rain upriver the night before and that the river was going to swell up, so if we didn’t leave right then it’d be another three days before we could even think of getting across. Man, it was scary. The water was already starting to get rough, but my mom decided we had to go.

We got into Tijuana around two thirty in the afternoon. Mom had the return address on my dad’s letter. The car pulled up, and my brother Tony remembers that he and my mom got out of the car
alone and told us to wait. My memory is that we all stumbled out of the car, tired, hungry, and cranky. Either way, I know we all needed baths badly. Mom knocked on the door, and nobody answered. She knocked again, and a woman answered. It was pretty clear, as I look back on it, that she was a prostitute.

To be honest I didn’t know what a prostitute was, or a floozy, or anything like that. I didn’t even know the words yet. Later on I would figure it out. But she looked like something the cat dragged in, and I knew enough to know that she wasn’t someone like my mom. My mom carried herself very differently.

This woman started screaming at my mom. “What do you want?” My mom stood up to her: “I want to talk to my husband, José. These are his children.”

“Ain’t no José here.”

Bam!
She slammed the door. My mom just broke down crying. I still feel it in my gut. Mom was crying and getting ready to leave and give up, and we were all wondering what would happen to us. We could see it in each other’s eyes.

It was time for another angel to appear—someone in the right place at the right time, guiding us and saying, “Don’t quit.” This time it came in the form of a wino who was lying next to the building, asleep. He woke up because of all the commotion and asked, “What’s going on?”

“I’m looking for my husband, José, and this is the only address I have,” my mom said.

“You got a picture of him?”

She showed him a photo, and he said, “Oh, yes. He’s inside.”

So Mom knocked on the door again. The lady came out again, screaming. And this time all the screaming woke up my dad. He came out, and I was the first thing he saw. Then he saw everyone else, and I saw his face starting to look like a bowl of M&M’s. I mean, all the colors in the rainbow: red, blue, yellow, green. His face went through all the emotions and all the colors.

Dad grabbed my mom by the arm and asked, “Woman, what are you doing here?”

“Don’t grab me like that!” And they started into it.

I’m amazed every time I think about the pure, steel-like conviction my mom had. She would not be deterred, even when her friends and family told her that she was crazy to do this, that she didn’t know what was going on in Tijuana. “You’re crazy—what if he doesn’t take you back?”

“Oh, he’s going to take me back. If he’s not, he’s got to look me in the eye and say that—and look in his children’s eyes.”

Dad got hold of somebody he knew and found a place for us to stay. They were building a house that didn’t have any windows or doors yet, and it was way up in the worst part of town, Colonia Libertad—ghetto, ghetto, ghetto. That neighborhood is still there. We had gone from the ghetto in Autlán to the ghetto in Tijuana. At first my dad wasn’t staying with us. My mom was pissed. He would come and visit us and bring a bag of groceries, but he would only stay for a short time.

Eventually Dad left the other woman, and we were all together again. Later on we started moving up, living in better places with electricity and plumbing, but I remember that the summer of 1955 was so hot we couldn’t even sleep. We were tired and cranky all the time. We had no money at all. We were hungry. There were fields nearby filled with big tomatoes and watermelons, and at night we kids would go and gorge ourselves. I think the owners looked the other way because they knew we were hungry.

My mom and all the other ladies in that part of Colonia Libertad did their washing using water from one particular well. They would haul these big
cubas
—laundry tubs filled with dirty clothes—and work those washboards. The well was so deep that the water had a sulfuric smell to it. One time I suddenly realized something: we didn’t have plumbing—we
should
have plumbing. If we did, Mom wouldn’t be washing clothes outside, using dirty water. I said, “Mom, someday when I grow up I’m going to get you your own house and a refrigerator and a washing machine.” She just kept washing and patted me on the head. “That’s nice,
mijo,
that’s really nice.”

“Hey! Don’t dismiss me like that,” I was thinking. “I
am
going to do it.” Of course I didn’t know then how I was going to do it; I was still just eight years old. But I made a promise—to my mom and to myself. As it turned out, it only took fifteen years. It felt so good when it came to be in 1970. I did it with my very first royalty check from the first Santana album. Even after everybody took a cut—the accountants, managers, lawyers—there was enough to keep my promise. I know it made her and my dad really happy. That was the first time they started looking at me like I wasn’t so crazy after all. They thought I had lost it after smoking all that weed and hanging around the hippies. To this day I can’t think of them in their own house in San Francisco without thinking about that disgusting well. It still feels good that I was able to come through.

Despite the circumstances, it was actually a nice transition from small-town Autlán to Tijuana. It was new, exciting, and different. I have great memories of learning to play marbles. My brother Tony taught me; he was really good with them. They looked like diamonds to me—I used to hold them up to the sun and look at them sparkle.

The tastes of Tijuana were a change from those of Autlán, because as I started to grow up my tastes were changing, too—from sweet to savory. There was pozole, a stew that my mom always ate when she was pregnant—that and tamales. There was mole sauce—which is like chocolate, just not sweet—and pipián sauce, more orangey and made from pumpkin seeds. Man, she could stretch the chicken with those sauces. She was great with shrimp and chiles rellenos, which are fried with cheese inside and batter outside—very few people know how to make it so it doesn’t get soggy and weird. My mom had that down, and she was an expert with machaca—shredded beef with eggs and so much spice that you’d get a good heat going. Wash it down with agua de Jamaica, which is made out of hibiscus petals and tastes like cranberry juice, only better.

I also remember that I started hearing more music than I had ever heard before. Right across the street was a restaurant with a very loud jukebox. It sounded like we were just one room over. That was the summer of Pérez Prado—“Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” He was Cuban but moved to Mexico. A lot of Cubans came over, and they’d record and get big in Mexico City, then humongous all over. Those mambos sounded so good. It was like an ocean of trumpets.

In the middle of the 1950s, Tijuana was a city with two sides to it—depending on which way you came into town. If you were American and drove south, it was Fun City, another Las Vegas. It had nightclubs and racetracks, late nights and gambling. It’s where the soldiers and sailors from San Diego and all the actors from Hollywood went to party. Tijuana had nice hotels and five-star restaurants—like the one in the Hotel Caesar, where they invented the Caesar salad.

For those of us heading north into town, Tijuana might as well have been the United States. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t crossed the border. There was a flavor of America, and a lot of Americans were always there, walking down our streets in nice suits and new shoes, making us think of what it was like just across the border.

The streets of Tijuana were not like those of Autlán. Autlán was the country as far as the ways people thought and treated each other were concerned. Tijuana was the city, and you could immediately feel a difference. People were drunk, angry, or upset about something at all times of the day. I soon started to learn that there was a way to walk those streets—a different kind of walk. Without disturbing anybody, you could project an attitude of “Don’t mess with me.” You don’t want anybody to mess with you there. When I got older and people would tell me about tough neighborhoods in Philadelphia or the Bronx, I would say, fuck that. That ain’t nothing compared to Tijuana. There’s a code of survival there that you learn very quickly.

You realize it’s true what they say—don’t mess with the quiet ones. They were the most dangerous. The ones that shot off their mouths—I’m going to do this or do that—they didn’t do shit. I also learned you didn’t want to mess with the Indians or mestizos. The cholos and pachucos might pull a switchblade. But those Indians would whip out a machete and could chop up a body like it was a banana.