Born in southern Mexico, Carlos Santana's family moved to Tijuana when he was seven. "It was a shock," Santana recalled to Rolling Stone, and his father put him and his brothers to work, selling gum on the street, shining shoes, and later on, singing Mexican folk songs. Showing an aptitude for the guitar, he soon accompanied his father, a bar musician, to his gigs in dirt-floored saloons where he witnessed such things as a police officer assaulting a prostitute.
By the age of 14, he'd had enough of performing in places that made him feel "really sick," and he went off on his own, earning $9 a week providing musical accompaniment to strippers, working off and on from 4 PM to 6 AM. After playing in such an environment for a while, the once hormonal teen Santana found himself sexually desensitized. "It's just watching an assembly job," he said. "After a while, you learn the most sensual thing is innocence."
It was also during this period of scraping by for a living in Tijuana when Santana says he was abused by an American man, who "almost every other day" would buy young Santana food, clothes, and toys, and then take him into the U.S. for immoral and illegal purposes. The routine abuse ended after the man saw Santana watching a woman through a window and slapped him. As Santana explained, "I looked at him for the first time for who he was: a very sick person."
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