The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana

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