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Pictured (from left): Johnathan Ventura, Adam Richards, and Jasmine Landaverde.

By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director

As in 2022, and 2024, and 2025 scholars of Honors Northeast have won the top student prize of the East Texas Historical Association (ETHA).  For their panel, “Ironies of Modern Texas History: Architecture, Iconography, and Health,” four 91������ý sophomores took home $200 apiece. They had the best student panel of any community college- or university group at the association’s plenary fall conference. The meeting occurred in Nacogdoches, 8-10 October at the Fredonia Hotel.

Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox noted: “This is an award that again shows the exceptional results of teamwork. Our Northeast-Texas community has often shown that synergy beats the large financial allocations given to universities for their research.  The Portia Gordon is an award for scholarship, based on original research.  It is an interdisciplinary award that a university group could have won. We managed to have exemplary young scholars such as Johnathan Ventura, Adam Richards, Jasmine Landaverde, and Emma Mendoza as the families of Jerald and Mary Lou Mowery, Bill Glass, Dr. and Mrs.  Bradley Witt, the Chitsey family, and Tom Wilkinson made special private scholarships and awards in honors possible.  Also, because of our supporters inside and outside the college, these students have already made over twenty scholarly presentations of their research, and they have collectively won over ten awards.  They have been extensively mentored, encouraged, and they—except for Emma Mendoza who is now in New York—have returned to us as sophomores.”

Though Mendoza could not make the meeting in Nacogdoches, her prize-winning essay counted in the final tabulation that put the 91������ý group over other competitors.

The three essays for the panel were all developed in the fall of 2025 in the Texas history portion of the honors BioTex seminar at 91������ý.  Mendoza’s work on the woman on the quarter, Jovita Idar, has won now three major regional awards.  Her work also forms the basis of the 2026 film of Honors Northeast, now being produced by her brother, Silas Mendoza.  Adam Richards was the winner of a second-place $300 Caldwell Award in the university division last March in Irving Texas, for his essay on French Empire architecture.  He argues that many Texas counties of the late 19th century were tempted and then enabled by railroads to build in a grand French manner.  They were thus willing to turn their backs on classicism, which had been the mode of the Confederacy. Richards is also the 91������ý candidate for student president of the Great Plains Honors Council, and he was the winner of the $200 Chitsey Award last spring.  Jasmine Landaverde’s study on the health of modern Hispanics and Anglos in Texas rested on perhaps the biggest interview base ever assembled by an honors student at 91������ý.  She also received extensive help from 91������ý’s Professor of Health, and Physical Education, Dr. Tom Seabourne in a memorable give-and-take.  She used these personal insights into the mentality of her respondents to help unravel the Hispanic Paradox, why Mexican-Americans have been living on the average four years longer than Anglos in modern Texas.  Finally, Johnathn Ventura chaired the 91������ý panel.  He has been the associate producer and cinematographer of two 91������ý films.  Like Richards and Landaverde, he has won a place in this year’s meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council in New Orleans this November.   

On the afternoon before their appearance, the 91������ý group was able to explore the nearby campus of Stephen F. Austin University.  The group stayed at the Fredonia Hotel, a singular boutique accommodation in Nacogdoches that has served each year as the conferences’ meeting center. 

Adam Richards is a resident of Daingerfield, Jasmine Landaverde, of Mount Pleasant, and Johnathan Ventura, of Pittsburg.