On being true to your school

By María Eugenia Guerra

The call to let me know I would be inducted into my high school hall of fame as a J.W. Nixon High School Mustang Legend caught me quite by surprise. Frankly, as one who does not take herself too seriously, I was taken aback by the news, which struck at so many levels of emotion. I'm not sure I can explain very well what a heartfelt recognition I believe this is, but I'll give it a whirl.
There was first the nod I had to give to my age and to this juncture in the long meander of a lifetime that I'd arrived at the irrefutable certainty that are fewer years ahead in the balance than the ones I've lived.
There was also the buzz, an under-the-skin thrill, to think that my old high school, one of the places that formed me, the halls of my well-documented travesuras, would consider me worthy of mention in so august a group of honorees who included Border Patrol Chief Oscar Garza ('65), dedicated lifetime educators Hector Rocha ('66) and Cynthia Haynes Ramirez ('70), IBC CFO Imelda Navarro ('76), Municipal Court Judge Alfonso Ornelas ('84), Nixon Athletic Department's Martín Sanchez ('84), physician Dr. Armando Hinojosa ('86), and engineer Kathy García ('88).
There was also to consider the brief ceremony in a bank meeting room in which kind words were spoken about each of us by a current Nixon High student who would today be a counterpart to whom we had once been. Other words were spoken by some of our former teachers, notably Laura Magnon and Cecilia Cantu, as well as former NHS Principal Viola Moore, now a school trustee. We, the inductees who knew each other from school days, caught up before the ceremony and introduced ourselves to those we did not know.
There was much at play that evening that ended on so high an emotional pitch. Mustang Legend Oscar Garza, Jr., a man whose intelligence, kindness, and warmth are indeed legendary in this community, put a well-defined pause on this newspaper's longstanding at-odds relationship with the United States Border Patrol by removing a USBP pin from his lapel and putting it on mine.
The comments of two individuals added much meaning to the evening. Imelda Navarro, one of the most high profile bankers in South Texas, recalled that she had not been a very active student but that she had been a member of the vocational club, a propitious membership, it turns out, that placed her in the employ of the International Bank of Commerce at the age of 16. The high point of her 25-year tenure with the bank has been her recent rise to a position on the bank's board of directors.
Martín Sanchez brought us to our feet with applause, admiration, and tears as he articulated a thanks to his "mother in heaven" for the example of determination and hard work she had provided him. He said in the most meaningful way that he'd always wanted to be a Mustang Legend. The truth is, however, that Martín has been one since his graduation in 1984 when he became a part of the heart of the school's athletic department.
So how did the child I was who'd always been a legend in her own mind make the leap to join this high profile group of individuals? Beats me, but I sure have reflected on a life, my own, that seems to have had no discernible trajectory, no star power.
I came to Nixon High School in 1965 as a junior, witness to and part of everything that happens at a new school -- the selection of a mascot, the naming of the school paper, the forming and naming of organizations. I was a member of the second graduating class in 1966. My best friend Loni Rose and I were the first editors of the Pony Express. In becoming the first junior class of Nixon High, we left a good part of the core of our peers at Martin High, friends that dated back to our years at Lamar Junior High, a reality that made a cross-town rivalry a slim, lackluster, and awkward possibility. There was an abruptness to the transition from the crowded halls of MHS to the airy, open walkways and sunny courtyards of NHS, the wooden floors, high ceilings, and tall, open windows of Martin to the Formica-topped desks and foam ceilings of Nixon.
This zip down memory lane has evoked major flashbacks to the child I had been, a girl who probably read too much (three newspapers daily) and was never a prom queen. Television was not then the sound bite, quick-learn medium that also doubles as intellectual anaesthesia. Books and printed periodicals were our window to the world and the most reliable venue for exploration and learning. The value of reading, and therefore writing, was inculcated in us early on by my parents, who did much to encourage a good vocabulary and to give us a sense of ideas and the world beyond the one we inhabited in Laredo.
I read everything I could get my hands on, especially books about history. And I wrote, knowing early in my development as a writer what it meant to find and use the right words, and better yet, what it meant to find your writer's voice.
And so I guess what I've tap-danced all around in this story, and with such elaborate constructs of vagueness that fail to bear witness to my writer’s voice, is that it has been heady stuff to be typified as a role model or an achiever or a legend when all you'd done was live the life you'd wanted.