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HARLINGEN — What's in the name?
Just ask Eric Mendoza.
He speaks about the pain and suffering and the great responsibility of naming a child at a humorous interpretation event.
Eric, 14, said, “This story is made up of other characters, so I like to use my body language and posture to imitate those characters.'' Preparing to go to the national competition It has been completed,” he said.
Eric is one of 24 Harlingen middle school students who have qualified for the 2024 National Speech and Debate Tournament in June. Students from all five of her middle schools in the Harlingen School District – Vera, Memorial, Coakley, Vernon, and Gutierrez – will gather in Des Moines, Iowa, to prove themselves in the competition. They compete against middle school students from all over the United States.
Harlingen School District Art Specialist Sally Cavazos-Navarro said the children qualified for the HCISD Middle School 2024 National Qualifier held on Feb. 10 at Gutierrez Middle School.
“Over 75 people showed up,” Navarro said. “They were vying for a spot in the tournament. They competed in 12 events, including humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, prose, poetry, and conference. I was so proud of you all and the five campuses. We’re so excited to have them all travel with us.”
The children are also quite excited.
“I'm really excited to go to the national tournament this year because I know what I'm doing and I want to win,” said Violet Thompson, 13, a seventh-grader at Vernon Middle School. Ta.
“This is my second year competing at the NSDA Nationals,” she said. “I'm going to participate in the Lincoln vs. Douglas debate. It's a college-level debate where topics are given about things that are happening around the world today.”
She further explained that in this event, contestants will write two speeches: a positive speech and a negative speech. If positive, the contestant agrees with the topic; if negative, they disagree.
“I have to write both because I don’t know which one I’m going to discuss until the actual day,” she said. “Then we played against both teams and came in first place with 0 losses and 3 wins.”
Students push themselves beyond their known abilities and even go through “23 minutes of hell.”
That's the name of the prose piece that 12-year-old Adrian Rivera is currently working on in preparation for the Iowa Games.
“I play a character who somehow falls outside the normal human world and gets sucked into hell,” said Adrian, a seventh-grader at Vera.
“Then he realized that what people were saying about hell was true,” he said. “It's scary, but it's also a place of pain, and it's really, really scary.”
But that's only part of the story.
“Eventually he realized that if he just kept pushing and kept moving forward, he would eventually overcome it,” Adrian said. “And because Jesus listened to him, he ends up going back to the normal world.”
This is very different from his previous work, which was a fun and innocent character with an interesting story. It's a challenge, one he'll take to Iowa in a few months.
“I’m very nervous but excited at the same time because it’s a very good opportunity,” he said.
