background on santana
Santana, a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started her public policy career in Oakland as an intern in the city manager's office 16 years ago. She worked her way up the Oakland administrative ladder as a management analyst in the police department before taking a job with San Jose.
Quan said she knew she'd found the right person when she learned that one of Santana's majors at Berkeley was ethnic studies, a department Quan and her husband pride themselves on co-founding.
"She's a little bit like me - but younger," said Quan, 61, of Santana.