The Story I Stopped Hiding

I couldn’t sleep.

It was the 2025 DeW Retreat. And the truth is, I almost didn’t go. I had known about DeW for years. I just didn’t think I belonged. Powerful women, big names, big stages, and me.

Then I met Anne Duffy at an event in Utah, and she told me I had to come. My friend Sara Ritchie, who is also a fellow DeW, nudged me too. They didn’t make me prove I belonged. They just kept holding the door open until I walked through it.

And that is how I ended up there, in a room full of about two hundred of the most powerful, generous, brilliant women in dentistry. The kind of room I had spent my whole life telling myself I didn’t belong in. And as I lay there in the dark, I kept asking myself the same question.

Where are the Latinas? We are running the front desks, the back offices, the operatories. We are translating for the patients. We are everywhere this industry lives, and nowhere it gets celebrated.

That night, Latinas in Dentistry was born. I founded it on my birthday, November 20th, 2025.

I was eight years old when I came to the United States from Bolivia. My parents had come before us, and my grandmother raised me and my younger sister Nayra in the years between. She is the reason we made it here at all. She is 83 now, still moving, still running around like she’s seventeen. She still lives in Bolivia. She doesn’t fully understand what I do or what I’ve built, but my dad fills her in. So does his family back home. They sit with her and try to explain it, and that is its own kind of prayer.

When it was finally our turn to come, we flew. But not with our own papers. We came with borrowed names and a borrowed story, because that was the only way in.

And when we landed in Miami, my parents weren’t there to meet us at the gate.

They couldn’t be. They were waiting outside, in the parking lot of Miami International Airport. That is where I met my mother and father, not at baggage claim, not anywhere a family is supposed to reunite. A parking lot. Next to a white car I still remember.

And here is the part nobody talks about. We didn’t remember them.

My little sister Nayra grabbed my hand so hard it hurt, because to us, the two people walking toward us with tears running down their faces were strangers. They were crying. And I was confused as to why.

There is a version of the immigrant story that is never told. The version where reunion happens in parking lots, airports, fences, and gates. The version where parents and children meet years later and don’t have the memories to recognize each other by.

I lost years with my parents that I will never get back. But the hardest thing wasn’t what happened to me. It was what they did for me. They left everything. Their home, their language, their mother, their daughters. They left it all so we could have a different life. They carried a grief every single day that I am only now, as a mother myself, beginning to understand.

That is the story I want to tell. Not mine. Theirs.

I became a teen mom.

For a long time, I couldn’t say that out loud. Especially not when I started in dentistry. People looked at me like I was an alien. Everyone told me my life was over.

It wasn’t. It was just beginning.

My son AJ is twenty-two now. Through him I learned strength. I learned defiance. I learned how to work, really work, because someone smaller than me was watching.

I have two more children now. They came years later, into a life their big brother helped me build. AJ was the one who made me her.

People ask me how I got from there to here. From an eight-year-old immigrant in a parking lot, to a teen mom, to founding three companies in dentistry. Honestly? It was God. He opened doors I didn’t deserve, closed roads that would have ended me, and gave me the faith, tenacity, and grit to keep walking.

The businesses I’ve built are not separate from that story. They are that story.

Through The Dental Culturist, I take the practices that actually need help, the ones whose owners care about their team, not just their numbers. Through Virtual Standard Solutions, we hire talent around the world so they can earn a real income from their own homes, so they don’t have to leave their children the way my parents had to leave us. And through Latinas in

Dentistry, I am setting the seat at the table that I needed and didn’t have.
These are not three businesses. They are one mission in three forms: taking what was taken from me, from my parents, from the women who came before us, and making sure the next generation doesn’t have to lose what we lost.

If you are reading this and you are an immigrant daughter, a young mother, a woman who has been told her past disqualifies her from her future, hear me.

Your story is not your ceiling. It is your foundation.

The thing you were told would end you is the thing that will fund the rest of your life. The shame you’ve been carrying was never yours. Set it down.

And if you are in dentistry and you have not yet seen yourself reflected in the rooms you walk into, come find me. There is a seat with your name on it.

A mis padres: gracias, por todo. Por cada sacrificio. Por cada noche que se fueron a dormir extrañando a sus hijas. Soy quien soy por ustedes. Los quiero mucho.

Mama Nati: te amo. Gracias. Nunca olvidaré tu sacrificio y tu amor.
AJ, Avyn, and Amberleigh: you are the reason for all of it. Thank you for letting me dream big and cheering me on. For loving me through the long days and the late nights, can’t forget those. Los amo.

Sí se puede.

Edna Butron Abreu is the founder of The Dental Culturist, co-founder of Virtual Standard Solutions, and the founder of Latinas in Dentistry. To connect or learn more, visit www.thedentalculturist.com.