Brownsville Veterans Memorial teams place near top at National History Day

Two teams from Veterans Memorial Early College High School placed near the top during National History Day competition June 11-15 at the University of Maryland in suburban Washington, D.C.

A group that is back this year at Veterans as seniors and includes Grace Garcia, Pierce Grove, Victoria Magaña, Joaquin Peña and Valeria Peña placed second for their performance of Falls and Frontiers, a 10-minute play about the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

The convention marked the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. The play won second place at Texas History Day in April. The performance also was the second time Magaña and Valeria Peña had placed second at National History Day, although the first was virtually in 2022 because of the pandemic.

Additionally, a team made up of sophomores Felicity Fok and Zeviel Piñeda placed third in a highly competitive group exhibit event that included teams from across the U.S. and Asia Pacific.

Competing as freshmen, Felicity and Zeviel also received special awards and recognition for research on their project, “The Hidden Bombe of World War II: Outwitting the Enigma Code.”

The project was about code-breaking efforts during World War II that allowed allied forces to “decrypt the code and basically spy on all the German transmissions, which allowed then to view all their plans, all their locations, and create this computer that was the next step in creating the technology, which is today the basis for modern encryption,” Zeviel said.

Felicity said it wasn’t until the 1970s that the British government revealed the successful efforts to decrypt the Nazi Enigma Code.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was a watershed event.

“This was the first event that was shown to the public and that people knew about that showed women standing up and trying to fight for their own rights and get people to listen to them and hear them out so they could have the same rights as everyone else,” Magaña said, noting that the convention was advertised in newspapers, rather than just by word of mouth, as had been the case before.

“I think it’s still relevant today because even though women have substantially more rights than they did in the 1840s, I would not say that it’s equal up to right now, so the whole concept of the convention was that in order to get their wants and their voices and their opinions heard still applies today because it’s so important and vital … although the issues are a little bit different it’s still the main concept of women having as much equality as possible. It applies to both,” Valeria Peña, the twin sister of fellow team member Joaquin Peña, said.

Grace Garcia said she thinks participating in the competition made team members better students and better citizens.

“I think it actually benefited us a lot because I think just being in this competition has made us more aware about the world surrounding us, like the ‘Me Too’ movement. I was not educated. I was unaware that actresses and celebrities would be demeaned just because of their race or their sexuality or their gender, so having been in this made me more socially aware,” she said.

“I’ve taken for granted everything that I’ve been given in the sense that researching out, we as minorities are not going to be treated the same as other people around us. And that was a real eye-opener to hear from and listen to other people, not just researching about women’s suffrage, but researching about different types of immigration. Because that went hand in hand with our project for how my character and Valeria’s character Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony met at a suffrage convention, an anti-slavery convention held in England … I feel that just being in this organization helped me be more socially aware of how different people were treated different based on who they were,” she said.

Grove said the History Day project also helped with organizational skills.

“The skill that history fairs really helps develop is the organization of information,” he said. “With history fairs you’re limited with the amount of time you have for your performance, and so the real way to win is to get as much information as possible in as little time as possible. Anyone can blurt out a lot of information. The real way to get people to know about it is to make it as simple as possible, as understandable as possible, so you can spread it out to as many people as possible and get them to swallow what you’re trying to feed them.”

Toward the end of the performance, Garcia gives “kind of a long monologue on the success of the Seneca Falls Convention and how it led to the passing of the 19th amendment, who owns the document and how it has come to be so, so significant to America today.”

Grove said Garcia’s narrative was “our way of compacting information during different scenes throughout the play. She allowed us to provide context to whatever scene we were doing. We tried to stick to the most important parts of this whole period in history and she allowed us to keep the bite-sized chunks, with the garnish of the historical context of (Mott and Anthony) meeting, the organization of the feminist movement, her interaction with her husband and trying to get his support and then finally with the Seneca Falls convention itself and then giving the declaration of sentiments, so Grace’s character was super important.”

Joaquin Peña said the project helped team members appreciate history’s smaller details.

“There’s so many nuances and little details in history that you don’t get in a classroom,” he said.

“No disrespect to our teachers, they do their best, but there’s hundreds of years of history and different ideas and statements and this and that. Doing your own research definitely opens your eyes to it. They say if you don’t know history you’re doomed to repeat it, and so I think that’s really important to realize. And I think this opened our eyes to that kind of content. As we saw with the news at that time it does kind of repeat itself. History happens in cycles, you’ll see it happen. Doing that research was eye-opening to all of us.”

R. Rodrigo Garcia, an Advanced Placement World History and European History teacher at Veteran’s Memorial, sponsored and took the teams to National History Day. This was the fifth group of kids to make the trip, although 2022 was virtual. His 2019 team garnered a third-place finish.

Brownsville ISD history teacher Albert Guerrero had teams in back-to-back years including Felicity Fok and Zeviel Piñeda this year, while Eric Mueller has had two national teams.