Pictured (from left): Emma Mendoza, Rebeca Martinez, Stephanie Hernandez, Andrew Perez, Araceli Landaverde, Dr. Andrew Yox, Yahir Garcia, and Dr. Dolph Briscoe, Chair of the Education Division of the Texas State Historical Association at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Houston.
By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
For the late Ross Perot, Texans are “thrice blessed.” In the case of NTCC honors students, “Texas” has provided over the years a remarkable spaceport for the launching of students into the realm of regional and national acclaim. Again, this March—more particularly, last Saturday in Houston--the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) conferred on NTCC scholars about $1,000 on scholarly awards. Similar outpourings have occurred in 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024. The students of Honors Northeast who typically take Texas History as a part of their first-year college experience in honors, have since 2008 aimed to compete for these state prizes, and again, have performed with exceptional alacrity and promise.
The NTCC Chapter of the Walter Prescott Webb Society, for starters, won the Chapter of the Year Award for two-year colleges. The TSHA officials have been impressed with NTCC’s niche cinema film series on Texas themes. Yahir Garcia, this year’s film editor, introduced the most recent film at the Webb-TSHA Houston meeting, Crude Conquest: The Triumph of Big Oil in Texas Politics 1935-1980, providing an overview of the process, his own reaction to film editing, and featuring the film trailer. The film, directed by Russell-Mowery Scholar, Skylar Hodson, with music by Kenny Goodson, will premiere at the NTCC campus on 28 March at 7 p.m. NTCC’s film initiatives through the years have received steady support from local patrons such as Jerald and Mary Lou Mowery.
NTCC scholars also won their 37th, 38th, 39th, and 40th Caldwell Essay Awards since competing for these prizes in 2008. First-Year NTCC Presidential Scholar, Stephanie Hernandez, of Mount Pleasant emerged with particularly high honors winning first place in the upper, university division, and $400. Hernandez pioneered the first general history of Tejano murals in the state, and argued that these showcases of ethnic culture evoke a change from protest to pride. The strident murals of Leo Tanguma in Houston in the 1970s, with their allusions to the Mexican Revolutionary mural tradition have gradually given way to reflections on community achievements, such as a Selena Quintanilla Craze that left its mark on the walls of all major Texas cities.
Araceli Landaverde’s fourth-place award in the lower division was also an impressive achievement. In recent years, large community-college powerhouses such as Lone Star and San Jacinto have drawn from a large base of top students and produced outstanding essays. Landaverde, also from Mount Pleasant, wrote about the experience of Hispanic Catholics in Mount Pleasant. Unlike the Chicano scholar Mario T. Garcia’s seemingly authoritative work, Católicos, which argued that Hispanic Catholics tended to trend left in morality and politics, Landaverde argues that in a smaller city like Mount Pleasant, they are quite emphatically trending right. Landaverde based her essay on five major interviews which she conducted locally.
NTCC’s Gladys Winkle Scholar, Mary-Faith Wilson cemented the sense that she will be sorely missed upon graduation this spring, by winning $300 and second place, in the university division. Wilson was the recent Eckman Award winner of the BioTex Seminar. She is a well-respected Title V tutor, and the winner last year of a First-Place Red River Symposium award. Wilson’s article deals with the ways novelists such as Elmer Kelton, and Larry McMurtry worked to sustain cowboy culture in a post-cowboy age. Kelton, notes Wilson, made an appeal for nostalgia, reflecting that the cowboy age was better than the present.
McMurty’s appeal to reconsider the cowboy was more complex. But in creating charismatic characters who could populate a hit-cinematic series such as Lonesome Dove, the Texas Pulitzer Prize winner also buoyed a culture that was receiving negative reviews, nationally.
Estefani Garcia, recently promoted to Presidential Scholar, placed fourth in the university division with her essay on Motivation and Mary Kay. Kay, one of the greatest female entrepreneurs of American history, was uniquely interested in motivation. As a single mother who suffered physical debilities for a time, she knew that motivation would play a crucial role not only in her success, but with the work of her female employees. Garcia argues that Kay placed a great emphasis on the internalization of inspiring catchphrases.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox, notes: the “Texas History seminar experience this last fall semester came with its own heartbreaks, fadeouts, fantastic initiatives, and almost-there surprises. But I was so thankful and excited when the semester ended. Honors alumni such as Emma (Shaw) Cunningham and Jessica Velazquez have helped to incentivize our work with conceptualization and creativity in research. I also knew that Hernandez, Wilson, Landaverde and Garcia had realized the challenge posed by their forebears in honors to engage in original work. The perspicacity and conceptual swagger of their essays, vindicated by the TSHA judges, represented one of the high points of my career as an educator.”
A list of NTCC’s forty Caldwell essay winners, which includes the name of Daniel Landaverde, Araceli’s brother, and Emmalea Shaw (Cunningham) can be found at: https://www.ntcc.edu/academics/honors-northeast/community/wall-honor-ho…. The Honors Northeast Wall of Honor also includes the resulting publications and other honors won by Cunningham and Velazquez while at NTCC.
