After sweeping the Grammys, Carlos Santana is now enjoying saturation coverage--to the great satisfaction of one San Francisco Mission District homeboy who generally eschews digital age icons. PNS commentator Roberto Lovato now lives in Los Angeles where he coordinates the Central American Studies Program at Cal State-Northridge.

LOS ANGELES -- After leaving my home altar at 6 am, I turn on my computer. There on the homepage of the Internet service provider is Carlos Santana smiling, wearing a hat.

Santana is the flavor of the day in this age of rapid product obsolescence. Normally I despise these digital age icons for what they do and don't do for our youth. Except Santana. He's not vapid because he and I went to San Francisco's Mission High School -- my eldest brother Omar went to school with him. His dad's mariachi played at my graduation party when I got out of Berkeley.

He's Santana. Global legend.

Never have I been so pleased at the bombardment of imagery, sound and video -- despite getting stuck the night of the Grammys in downtown L.A. traffic. All last week we were saturated with a message of hope and love. As "New Age" as he may be to some, Santana is someone I can believe, someone who was and is thoroughly enmeshed in our realities.

The cultural Mecca that was our San Francisco Mission district is now dead. There are no congueros playing in Dolores Park, and each year I see fewer and fewer people I know at Carnaval and the other now-corporatized street fairs Santana used to play at. The few lowriders left in the hood have nowhere to hang out, get high and listen to Samba Pa Ti. The digital economy born just south of San Fran also gave birth to the landlord who booted out artists like Santana. Who can afford to live there now?

Yet one of the great things about Santana and his music is its ability to transcend. He even has a song called "Transcendence" from the days when many first wrote him off as a hippie turned cult follower of guru Sri Chinmoy. This latest comeback follows a string of electric, poetic comebacks. In each phase I remained grateful to him for his music, his example.

Santana and my brother Ramon are largely responsible for my being alive today. His music and my brother's example as a man who could be kind and cry with another male led me out of the culture of anger and self-destruction that was also the Mission. They made it OK to think of myself and actually be beautiful under the macho uniform of Ben Davis jeans, Pendleton shirts, wino shoes and stiff body postures. The soulful organ, righteously screaming lead vocals and furious guitar riffs in songs like "Mother's Daughter" provided the background music with which we buffed weights and prepared to wage barrio warfare.

My friend Osvaldo, a former Salvadoran guerrilla, and I joke about how Santana's music was as revolutionary as any protest music they heard during and after the war in El Salvador. Santana's transcendence was no marketing ploy.

Santana was and is as much Devadip-hippie as he was Mexicano, as much classic Rock n' Roller as godfather of Roc en Espanol. He taught me that great artists, those who change lives, have an organic link to community, to movements of people. He accepted the Grammy for my friend Carl, his conguero, for the Mission, for Latinos, for all of us. The balm he provided my soul after my friend Louis was shot three times or after Danny from Mission High hung himself makes Santana one of those about whom Berthold Brecht wrote, "There are those who struggle one day, and they are good. There are those who struggle many days, and they are better. And then there are those who struggle all of their lives, These are the essential ones."

I know in my body the struggles that brought Santana from Tijuana and the Mission district to the Grammy's at Staples Center last week. I know in my soul the contradictions and dissatisfactions he has overcome. Almost every day of my life I always remembered Santana got out. He got out of the Mission. He got out in both body and spirit. And he always came back.

That's why he won the Grammy.