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

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.
    I saw it almost happen one time just after we got to Tijuana, right outside of church. The machete hit the ground when one guy missed chopping another guy’s leg off. Sparks flew off the street when the blade hit it. You don’t forget stuff like that—the sound or the sparks. It was scary. Next thing, the police came over and started shooting in the air to break up the fight before the men did some damage. I realized that this was not a movie. This was real life, man. I also learned that very seldom was the fight about money; it was almost always about a woman.
    I don’t remember being hassled at all in Autlán. We kids had to fight more in Tijuana. The good thing was that it was more about bullies than gangs. The gangs would come later, after I left. Bullies used to pick on me, and looking back on it I see that it wasn’t personal. It was just that ignorance is ignorance, and the hood was nasty. I had to be able to know when to walk away and know when to hold my ground so they didn’t keep piling up on me. I learned that if they thought I was crazier than they were, they would rather go around me. A few times I had to do that—fight and act crazy. It got to the point where I would find a rock that was the size and shape of an egg, and if things got weird I would put it in between