Mittzy Matamoros graduated from high school in Richmond in the spring of 2020 — just as the world was shutting down — without a clear sense of direction.
“I felt like I was lost,” she recalls. “I had time, but I didn’t have time, you know?”
A daughter of immigrants and the first in her family headed to college, she enrolled at Berkeley City College still searching for a path. “As a daughter, you want to make your parents proud,” she says. “I knew I had to be something greater.”
The turning point came next door to the Baskin-Robbins where she’d worked since high school: a dental office needed someone bilingual in Spanish. She got hired on the spot, first to translate and assist, then — when a dental assistant left — to train into the role itself. Three years of on-the-job training and a radiology and infection control certification later, she’d found something she didn’t expect to love.
“People think the dentist is a place where you just have fear,” she says. “But through the conversations with the patients, working with the doctor — I just fell in love with it.”
Encouraged by the dentist she worked for, Mittzy began mapping out prerequisites for dental hygiene with a counselor at Berkeley City College, taking classes across Berkeley City, Merritt, and Laney around her work schedule. She was accepted into two competitive, lottery-based programs — Diablo Valley College and Santa Rosa Junior College — and chose DVC after her family relocated to Concord. She graduated in May 2026.
Programs like DVC’s dental hygiene pathway, which accept as few as 20 students a year through regional lottery admission, are exactly the kind of high-demand healthcare pipeline BACCC works to support and connect across the Bay Area — and DVC’s Promise program covering her tuition was, she says, what made two years of full-time training financially possible.
“Without it,” she says, “I don’t know how I would have managed.”
Now preparing to practice as a registered dental hygienist, Mittzy has already seen her bilingualism become a clinical asset. Spanish-speaking patients who arrive anxious open up the moment she greets them in their own language.
“You say hi to them in Spanish, and they’re like, oh, you speak Spanish!” she says. “They come in timid, very closed off — and then they joke around. They’re just so much more comfortable.”
Latinx dental hygienists make up just 12% of the field nationally, a statistic Mittzy carries as motivation rather than pressure. “I’m excited and proud to be contributing to that number,” she says. “I want to make a difference for my community. That’s what drives me.”