After five years as Associate Director of the Southern RI AHEC, Delores is giving up the reins for other endeavors. Her resignation was effective on January 1, 2016, but according to Delores, “It is not a retirement but an advancement to other projects.” She will still be available to the College of Nursing as a guest presenter and consultant.
Her journey to this point has been as diverse as her programs. She grew up in the Bronx and had a grandmother that greatly influenced her life by introducing her to much of the culture available in New York City. On her meager income, her grandmother took her to museums, ballets, shows, restaurants instilling in her a love and curiosity for and about people, places and ideas that undoubtedly prompted her future travels and search for new experiences.
Delores started her academic career as a biology major at City College of New York. In the mid-late 1960s, CCNY was tuition free, books cost about $200 and a monthly bus pass a little extra. After graduating from CCNY, she was one of two black students admitted into a 2-year program in the School of Nursing at Columbia University where she earned her Bachelor of Science degree and then was licensed as a Registered Nurse. She worked briefly at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital after graduating before she and a classmate headed for California where she worked the night shift for the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco. In California, Delores was recruited by the United States Air Force to work in Pediatrics, Ob-Gyn and dependent care. Nurses were needed during the Vietnam War era, but she was stationed in Texas then Japan. She learned enough Japanese to be conversant while traveling and was very moved by how the Japanese people welcomed and embraced her into their community. While stationed in Japan, she took the opportunity to travel extensively throughout most of that country, and also throughout the Far East by train, boat and air. Among the countries she visited were Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, and Thailand. Because she had lost a brother, who had been an Eagle Scout, in Vietnam, she especially remembers taking a trip with a group of Eagle Scouts to the top of a 13,000-foot mountain in north central Taiwan. After two years in the Far East, Delores decided to end her military service, retiring as a Captain.
Delores returned to New York City and entered into the field of Public Health seeing patients in Harlem and the Lower East Side with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. She subsequently earned a Masters in Liberal Studies from New York University and decided to expand her academic achievements by pursuing a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology while at NYU. Her dissertation fieldwork in the mid 1980s took her to Yemen and eventually back to healthcare there in the mid 1990s. Writing her dissertation while working “was one of the hardest things I have ever done.” She resided in two different Yemeni communities for 18 months with her female partner, Lee. A new world opened up for the two of them as Delores’s ability to speak Arabic became more fluent. Delores’s parents who visited them in Yemen were treated as honored guests. Her mother and stepfather were greeted with such warmth and enthusiasm that it is still quite amazing on reflection over 30 years later!
In becoming an Anthropologist, the focus of Delores’s research and teaching shifted towards becoming an advocate and activist for diverse cultural communities, especially the most marginalized. As an educator, she most enjoyed exposing students to different cultures outside the classroom. At Lake Forest College, she directed student learning in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago (Pilsen). Her travels also took her to other visiting professorships in different parts of the country. She also was Director of the ALANA (African, Latin, Asian, Native American) Cultural Center at Colgate University in upstate New York. Evidence of her interest in promoting diverse cultures can be seen in a mural that students painted in the ALANA Cultural Center under the guidance of a local Native American artist, Eli Thomas.
While directing the ALANA Cultural Center, she returned to Yemen for further research that led to making a film on Yemeni women who were primary health providers that was funded by a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship, the Dutch Government and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. An important observation from her earlier work in Yemen was that racial differences were secondary to birth status and family occupation in this Muslim country where according to traditional values all who practiced Islam were considered equal. However, because discrimination against African-identified Yemenis has been so deeply engrained over centuries, it made sense to highlight significant movement toward equality made by the Yemeni health workers. Known as “murshidat,” these women, despite minimal training were improving relations with their most marginalized neighbors. Murshidat: Female Primary Health Care Workers Transforming Society in Yemen can be viewed at http://www.deloresmwalters.net/yemen-video/
In the early 2000s, Delores taught courses related to the Underground Railroad at Northern Kentucky University in a joint position with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. She had developed this interest in the cultural/historical heritage of African Americans after helping to inaugurate the Freedom Trail Commission in Madison County in upstate New York. She honed this interest still further upon discovering the story of Margaret Garner, a 19th century enslaved black woman who killed her two year old daughter to prevent the child from being returned to slavery after the family’s escape from Kentucky to Ohio ended in failure. Garner’s incredible story is the inspiration for Tony Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved.
About the time Delores was exploring the cultural/ historical milieu of Margaret Garner, she became a research fellow with Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Previously, she had partnered with historian, Mary Frederickson to host a symposium which became the basis of their co-edited book, Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery and the Legacy of Margaret Garner, (University of Illinois Press, 2013). The interdisciplinary chapters use Garner as a focal point to illuminate the lives of women who rejected subjugation and enslavement in contemporary, historic and global settings. Similarly, Delores’s workshops and presentations aimed at empowering students, educators and community members are based on the inspirational life of Garner.
In 2010, Delores was appointed Director for the Southern Rhode Island Area Health Education Center (sriAHEC) in the College of Nursing at URI after directing diversity initiatives as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Council for Research on Women (now called Re: Gender) in NYC for two years. During her time at URI, she also was Director of Faculty of Color Recruitment and Retention in the Office of Community, Equity and Diversity as well as Assoc. Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Human Science and Services. For the former position, she conducted interviews and reported on the perceptions of faculty of color with respect to their progress toward tenure and inclusion within URI’s campus climate. For the latter position, she helped organize and facilitate campus-wide workshops on racial/ethnic and LGBT diversity. In July of 2013, Delores once again assumed the Directorship of sriAHEC until her resignation at the end of December 2015.
Delores believes that sriAHEC has been effective in helping to launch and implement core programs: Pathways to Nursing which has now six graduates; the Multicultural Student Nurses Association (MSNA); and the creation of an outreach video, “Serving the Creator: Narragansett Elders Speak on their Careers in Health Care” that aims to encourage students of color to enter the health care field then serve in their communities. Support for other programs by sriAHEC is also ongoing: Summer Internships for graduate and undergraduate students; the Mentoring Program; and Interprofessional Education. As the goal of AHEC’s nationwide is to bring better health care to underserved communities and to diversify the healthcare workforce, Delores also believes that sriAHEC can play a significant role in advancing the goals of URI’s new Academic Health Collaborative.
As Delores advances toward other opportunities in the next phases of her life, she hopes to continue offering workshops and programs on diversity, inclusion and cultural competency, which raise awareness for URI and the broader community of the critical need to address health disparities in Rhode Island and beyond. “The incredible energy and spirit of adventure on the part of the students in groups such as the MSNA should help propel us toward this timely and worthy goal.”
More information on sriAHEC can be found at https://web.uri.edu/southernriahec/
More information on Dr. Walters’s workshops and presentations can be found at http://www.deloresmwalters.net/culturalhistorical-empowerment/