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Pictured: Students with the mural of the Joe Guerra Library in Laredo (left) and at the Mary Couts Burnett Library at TCU in Fort Worth. 

By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director

Thanks to another generous gift from David L. Stevenson, as well as other donors, 91����� honors students were able to complete the longest research trip yet.  From 25 to 29 May, three entering honors students, and two returning sophomores were able to explore old microfilms, unique local sources, and the spacious stacks of the Mary Couts Burnett Library at Texas Christian University.  Half of this effort was devoted to the upcoming film of Honors Northeast, and the 91����� Webb Society, a project that will be the 15th in a series of original cinematic productions. This year’s proposed film concerns a topic pioneered by 91����� Winkle Scholar, Emma Mendoza’s award-winning research on Jovita Idar. It is a beguiling and significant theme, indeed one to inspire such a trip.

The engraving of Jovita Idar on 389 U.S. million U.S. quarters from 2023-2025 was a significant event in the story of American iconography. She is the first Mexican American, and arguably the first true “Latina” to appear on a U.S. unit of currency.  But who exactly is being commemorated?  Film scholar, Emma Mendoza has argued that Jovita Idar, historically remains more a “planchet”—a pre-coin blank, than a defined heroine. Though acclaimed by other scholars as a kind of Queen Esther who risked her life for Tejanos, a suffragette, the first voice of Tejana journalism, and an important opinion leader, she may indeed have been none of these things.  Did Idar censure President Woodrow Wilson? Did she decry lynching? Did she throw her body in the way of attacking Texas Rangers?   As Mendoza puts it, in regard to the most acclaimed actions of her life, “Idar is said to have asserted something she may not have said, to have written, something she may have not written, and to have stopped something that she could not stop.”

Words like these were good enough last spring for Mendoza to achieve a first-place Texas Caldwell Award ($400), a Britt Award of the Great Plains Honors Council ($100), and a first-place, McGraw-Hill poster award ($400).  They also helped inspire the May trip which spent two days in the Joe Guerra library of Laredo, with Mendoza, and José Fuentes, 91�����’s first international president of Phi Theta Kappa, rifling through Laredo’s old Spanish newspaper La Crónica. The trip also enabled an excursion to the Mary Couts Burnett Library of Texas Christian University to consult sources on early twentieth-century Mexican American history.

Though the proposed film will hopefully bring to light the findings of the trip, the excitement of research advanced as the 91����� scholars found much to confirm Mendoza’s argument.  “One might call it confirmation bias,” noted Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox, who drove the group minivan for the effort, “but Mendoza’s work really came into focus when we saw what a unique position the Idar family, and the Mexican-American community of Laredo assumed at this time. Laredo was inundated after 1910 with thousands of Mexican nationals--because of the Mexican revolution.  The Idar family and their family newspaper were able to capitalize on this unique influx for a time. But Jovita was completely overshadowed by Mexican feminists—who also wrote for La Crónica and were never commemorated—simply because they were not United States citizens.”

The trip also allowed three incoming honors students to learn some of the fundamentals of historical research and even begin and advance on a topic in Texas history. Those three included Sky Bass, an accounting major, who is focusing on the “avant garde accounting” that occurred in Enron before the fall, Jack Heavner, who has started a pioneering work on the history of lignite mining in Texas, and Drew Mays, who is addressing  the story of leading troubadour singers like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Stevie Ray Vaughan from the standpoint of their actual contribution to a Texas cultural tradition.

The trip also included another first for 91�����.  Emma Mendoza was able to present her work on Idar at the meeting of Alliance for Texas History (ATH).  It was the first time that an 91����� student presented before this historical association. The ATH broke away from the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) in 2023 over a disagreement about the value of traditionalist Texas history.  The 91����� Walter Prescott Webb Society, composed mainly of honors students, is part of the official collegiate auxiliary of the TSHA.

Dr. Andrew Yox noted after the trip, that “our honors program and students are very indebted to amazing supporters like David L. Stevenson who have allowed us these unprecedented opportunities with research, scholarship, and film-making.”