Carlos Santana plans benefit concerts in Tijuana: ‘I want to give people a better opportunity for life’

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Carlos Santana is poised to return to Tijuana, the Mexican border city where he grew up and honed his guitar chops in nightclubs as a teenager before moving to San Francisco in the mid-1960s.

The Latin-rock pioneer hopes to spearhead a fundraising concert next spring in Tijuana, where he has not performed since a 1992 homecoming concert at the coastal city’s now-shuttered bullring by the sea. If all goes according to plan, the concert will become an annual event.

“It’s around the corner. We want to be there pretty soon,” Santana, 74, told The San Diego Union-Tribune of his planned fundraising concert launch.

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“I’m going to try to make a connection with certain people in Tijuana, and then possibly start doing it in April or May.”

Santana will kick off his summer tour tonight at San Diego’s North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre. The goal of his proposed benefit concerts in Tijuana is, he said, “to feed people, clothe people, educate people and give them a better opportunity for life.”

A 2013 Kennedy Center Honors recipient, Santana is a native of Autlán de Navarro in the southwestern Mexican state of Jalisco. He grew up mostly in Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad neighborhood, which had neither electricity nor running water at the time. He and his younger brother, Jorge — who died in 2020 — would help their parents make ends meet by selling gum on street corners.

In 1998, Santana founded the Milagro Foundation. A publicly funded organization, it gives grants to community-based, tax-exempt groups worldwide that work with under-resourced children to provide education, health care and exposure to the arts. The foundation has thus far distributed $18 million in grants to nonprofits in 36 states and 18 countries.

Speaking last week from Las Vegas, Santana said he hopes to obtain support for the Tijuana fundraisers from other organizations and individuals.

“It would be a yearly concert,” he said. “I’ll invite also other people with deep pockets and big hearts to contribute and just give away food, clothing, books and education.

“With music, I’m able to do something more than just be ‘the guitar player from Tijuana.’ I want to be a positive force that helps people discover their own divinity.”