JC
Deborah Santana, wife of Carlos Santana, discusses her experiences, relationships, and mixed identity in new memoir, Space Between the Stars.

Born Deborah King in San Francisco in 1951, Santana is the daughter of a biracial marriage. Her father, African-American blues pioneer, guitarist, and distinguished tenor, Saunders King, cut the first significant electric blues record, 1942’s “SK Blues;” her mother, an American with Irish-English roots, was a full-time working woman at a time when it was expected that wives would stay home. Raised in a colorblind household, Santana recollects in Space Between The Stars the shock she felt from early encounters with prejudice at school, and the fortitude, and love she absorbed from her parents to help overcome the pain. From them, Deborah writes, she and older sister Kitsaun, “learned… to be strong, unsubmissive, and unwavering in our purpose.”