History makers: students participate in 2024 National History Day New Mexico State Contest

Months of hard work, research, labor and passion were put to the test this weekend, as more than 200 middle and high school students from across New Mexico converged on the University of New Mexico Saturday to participate in the 2024 National History Day New Mexico State Contest. From Moriarty, Silver City, Lordsburg and seemingly everywhere in between filed off buses in front of Dane Smith Hall, carrying giant pieces of cardboard, voice recorders and laptops into the building. Once inside the hall, they assembled their contest research project, piece by piece.

The theme of the 2024 contest was “Turning Points in History,” which invited students to consider questions of time and place, cause and effect, change over time, and impact and significance. Student’s research project topics ranged from the bubonic plague, to the impact of the artwork of Pablo Picasso.

Students presented their projects to a team of volunteer judges, who were experts in various fields of history and education. These judges provided feedback, and guidance to help students refine their projects for advancement to the next stage of the competition, the national contest at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland in June.

Among those students setting up their displays were Moriarty High School seniors McKenzie Satterfield and Alecia Gauna. The pair has been participating in the state contest all four years of their high school career. This year, they decided to focus their project on the Rwandan genocide.

“Our focus this year has been capturing the human suffrage and perseverance,” Gauna said. “So when we found the Rwandan genocide, an event that has been turned a blind eye to, we knew we wanted to spread awareness about this.”

Satterfield and Gauna said they began researching their topic at the start of this school year and said it took them a total of three weeks to design and build the project for the contest. Their project consisted of a three sided poster board with various talking points about the event and an audio and visual component as well, that included several interviews with survivors of the genocide.

The duo was able to locate one of the survivor through the Holocaust Museum and another through a teacher of theirs who knew Carl Wilkins, an American Christian missionary and the former head of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International in Rwanda. Wilkins was the only American who decided to remain in Rwanda after the genocide began.

“(The survivors) were very willing to talk to us because their main point was to spread awareness about the event and tell their story, which not only helps them heal, but also lets others know, so this event doesn’t occur again,” Gauna said.

From a distance, the pair’s history teacher, looked on with a proud smile on her face. Moriarty High School history teacher Amy Page has had both Satterfield and Gauna in one class or another their entire high school careers’ and called their work this year some of the best she’s seen from them.

“Seeing them develop over the last four years, starting as freshman and teaching them analysis skills, teaching them how to do collegiate level research and to think for themselves. These girls have some pretty impressive stuff under their belts,” Page said.

That sense of pride in the work of their students was shared by Claudie Thompson, a fellow history teacher from Silver High School in Silver City. “They love (the history contest), they’re history nerds, history geeks, whatever you call them, they don’t care, they love it,” Thompson said.

Thompson himself was once of those young “history nerds” and so was Robert D. Martinez, the New Mexico state historian. As a young man, Martinez said he became curious in his own family’s history and begin diving into his own background. From there, he developed a love for history that led him to earning his master’s in history from the University of New Mexico.

For the past five years, he’s severed as state historian and on Saturday, he severed as one of the masters of ceremonies during the award ceremony segment of the contest. As he announced the winners for the different topics and grade levels, you could see a smile almost permanently plastered on his face. When asked what he hopes the students who participated in the contest take away from this experience, Martinez said a great curiosity about the world around them.

“I hope they have their horizons broadened, and they learned why we are here and take with them a curiosity about their history and other people’s history because we are a diverse state and country,” he said.