Ildaura Murillo-Rohde spent her career on a mismatch she first noticed in a New York psychiatric ward: a Hispanic patient population being cared for by a nursing workforce that did not include them and often could not speak to them.
Panama to New York
Murillo-Rohde was born on September 6, 1920 in Panama and came to the United States in 1945. She took her nursing diploma at the Medical and Surgical Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio in 1948, and went into psychiatric nursing.
She then collected degrees for two decades: a bachelor's in psychiatric nursing at Teachers College, Columbia, a master's in teaching and curriculum development and a second in education administration, and in 1971 a doctorate from New York University — the first Hispanic nurse to earn a PhD there.
The problem
Working in psychiatric nursing in New York and later in Texas, she kept meeting the same thing. Hispanic patients were a large and growing share of the caseload. Hispanic nurses were almost absent from the workforce, from the faculties and from the professional bodies, and the national nursing organizations were not counting them, recruiting them, or taking up anything specific to their patients.
This is Madeleine Leininger's argument arriving from the other direction. Leininger came at culture as a subject nurses should study; Murillo-Rohde came at it as a workforce problem, on the reasoning that a profession which does not contain a community will keep getting that community's care wrong regardless of what it studies.
The organization
In 1975 she founded what became the National Association of Hispanic Nurses, and served as its first president.
It did the plain work: counted Hispanic nurses, funded scholarships, pushed schools on recruitment and retention, and gave Hispanic nurses somewhere to organize — the same function the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses had served for Black nurses from 1908, and for the same reason.
Positions
Murillo-Rohde was an associate dean at the University of Washington, the first Hispanic dean of nursing at New York University, and a United States permanent representative to UNICEF.
She was named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing in 1994. She died in Panama on September 5, 2010, the day before her ninetieth birthday.
Hispanic and Latino nurses remain substantially under-represented in American nursing relative to the population, which is the gap she named fifty years ago and the reason the association she founded still exists.
Related
- Madeleine Leininger
- Mabel Keaton Staupers
- Luther Christman
- Internationally educated nurses
- The nursing shortage
Sources
- Ildaura Murillo-Rohde, for the chronology, her degrees and the founding of the association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Our history. National Association of Hispanic Nurses. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Living Legends. American Academy of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.