A Novel · Vicente Gabriel Flores
A king's promise:
title and land, hijos dalgo de solar conocido —
a name behind the name, by right of birth.
The promise was kept.
In seventeen-thirty, from Tenerife
the harness-maker's son sailed;
crossed the Atlantic; rode the camino real;
and at the fork of two rivers made his stand —
Vicente Álvarez Travieso,
alguacil mayor de Béxar.
The grant was real. The river was real. The land was real.
Then the king died.
The empire fell.
The wars came: Mexican, Texan, American, Civil, Mexican again.
The flags changed — five of them, sometimes in a week.
The marshal came. The bandits came. The federales came.
What was given was taken.
What was taken was won back.
What was won back was taken again.
For two hundred and ninety-six years,
across two oceans and five flags,
one Tejano family has done one thing only:
they held on.
Si no por su mano, por la nuestra.
Sigue.
No mires atrás, hijo.
His hand. Now mine.
PASADOR is the 296-year saga of one Tejano family — finally told by the grandson who heard the whole story on a porch on Florence Street and promised, at fourteen, to write it down.
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The Novel
A Tejano family saga from the volcanic island of Tenerife to the International Bridge at El Paso, told as five plays in the bilingual register of the border — in the chronicle voice of García Márquez and the moral interior of Dostoevsky.
PASADOR opens on the night of November 15, 1913 — the night Pancho Villa took Ciudad Juárez — with a man making the only decision the body makes for itself, in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The boots are on the second floor of the Palacio Municipal. José Jesús Flores Stephenson — three-term alcalde of Juárez — presses a folded paper into his nine-year-old son Carlos's hand and gives him one word: Sigue. Two hours later, father and son walk the International Bridge into El Paso, the boy at the alcalde's side.
But the story Carlos carries began long before that bridge. It began in 1730, in a harness-maker's kitchen in Tenerife, with a king's promise of title and land in New Spain. The five Plays of PASADOR take that promise across the founding of San Antonio in 1731, the Texas Revolution and the Alamo, the marriage of Juana María Ascárate and the Welsh-Catholic Hugh Stephenson at El Paso del Norte, the silver mine at Santa Rita and the Civil War, and the three terms of José Jesús as alcalde of Ciudad Juárez through the Mexican Revolution.
The novel's frame is the grandson — born in El Paso in 1974, raised in his grandparents' house on Florence Street, where Carlos told him the whole story on the porch — who promised at fourteen, when they buried his grandfather in October of 1988, that he would write it down. The paper was not opened for eighty-two years. PASADOR is the question the grandson kept asking it: what is mine, what was given, and what have I done with what was given.
Each generation inherits what the last built and loses it to a different form of dispossession: a king's deed on land the Payaya had held for twelve thousand years; a republic that made its founders foreigners in the country they helped build; a treaty that moved the line without asking the people on it; a federal marshal's sale that turned Concordia Ranch into a cemetery.
The novel's question is the same across all five plays: what survives when everything you built gets taken?
The answer is spoken by a mayor in a campesino's shirt on the International Bridge on a November night in 1913: you carry what has no document.
Literary historical fiction · 57,826 words · Written in the bilingual register of the Texas-Mexico border.
The Documentary Companion
The Chronicles
Alongside the novel, a documentary companion — ten chronicles, eighty-eight thousand five hundred words, two hundred and ninety-six years of one family — written in García Márquez tribute voice from the harness-maker's son in 1730 Tenerife to the grandson writing in 2026 Austin.
Each Part is built from nine cards — setting, events, places, people, food, language, primary documents, sources — grounded in the Bexar Archives, parish registers, the El Paso County Historical Society's Hall of Honor, and fifty years of genealogical research by Alfredo C. Flores. The novel invents what the chronicle cannot. The chronicle records what the novel must respect.
La cosecha no ha llegado todavía.
Excerpts
Prologue: The Crossing
International Bridge · El Paso, Texas · Noviembre de 1913 · Nine o'clock in the evening
The boy had been told not to look back.
He was nine years old and his name was Carlos F. Flores, born the tenth of October, nineteen hundred and three, in the house his grandfather had built on the south side of the city. Ciudad Juárez, the name the city had always had and would always have, because a city's name lives in the mouths of its people and not in any document. He was slight for his age, with the Stephenson eyes that had crossed the Atlantic from Kentucky to this valley a hundred years before him: pale, direct, the blue-grey of early morning. The rest of his face was entirely Flores. The face of a people who had been in this valley since before the valley had a name that anyone else recognized.
His father's hand was around his wrist. Not the Sunday-walk hand. The other one.
Below the bridge, the Río Grande moved south in the November dark. Thirty yards wide, the color of iron at night, moving at the speed of something that has been moving since before anyone was here to watch it and will continue when there is no one left to watch. Its sound came up through the bridge planks: not dramatic, just present. The low continuous voice of water always going somewhere, never arriving.
He looked back.
He had been told not to. He was nine years old and the city behind him was the only world he had ever known, and something in him — something below obedience, below fear, below the urgency of the night — understood that you must see what a world looks like in the moment of leaving it.
From What Was in the Air · The Fifth Play · 1913
The Foundation · A King's Promise
A Novel of the Founding of San Antonio
The book underneath the others. Before the bridge at Juárez, before the porch on Florence Street, there was a harness-maker's son on a burning island. In 1706 a mountain comes down on the harbor of Garachico; twenty-five years later, at the fork of two rivers in Texas, that same son founds the first civil town the Spanish province had ever had.
Told as a novel in dramatic-script form — scenes, voices, and choral poems — and framed by a descendant, home in 2018 on a pecan farm on the Texas–New Mexico line, who sets it all down. The Spanish is left untranslated. It does not look for a version of the founding in which the family was innocent: a family crossed the world for a life and built one, and the river it built on already carried an older name. Both are set down whole, and neither laundered.
From the Induction
A pecan farm · Anthony, New Mexico · 2018
What follows is the nights.
Scene One — Before
Garachico · Tenerife · 1706
The wine trade is thinning and an English fleet is rumored offshore. Old Bartolomé insists that loyal subjects are safe ones. Juan Álvarez Travieso threads his awl.
JUAN: …la lealtad es una cosa hermosa que jamás, en toda la historia del mundo, le ha parado una bala a nadie.Así que coso bien los arneses. Por si un día la lealtad tiene que salir corriendo.
Scene Five — Yanaguana
San Antonio de Béxar · 1731
The surveyors have entered the land against his name. Vicente walks out alone to see the ground the book says is his — a bend of the river, old cypress and older pecan — and finds an old Payaya man already there, gathering pecans the way his fathers had.
Vicente stands at the edge of his own legal ground and watches an old man gather pecans, and what he is watching, and knows that he is watching, is an older claim than the one entered in the cabildo's book — a claim no court of the King's is built to be able to hear.
Choral Poem · The Last Good Spring
Un año así no se llora. Se guarda. Y un día sirve para algo.
A Companion Play
The Night Villa Came to Juárez
A novella-length play in five acts and four choral poems. One night. The night Pancho Villa took Ciudad Juárez and the alcalde walked his nine-year-old son across the International Bridge into El Paso.
November 14–15, 1913. The federal garrison sleeps. Villa rides north on a coal train. By dawn he holds Ciudad Juárez. The alcalde and his family walk the International Bridge into El Paso. The play takes the honest position the novel only glances at: the family on the bridge was the class Villa was fighting against — and the play does not pretend otherwise. Shakespeare's five-act spine, Dostoevsky's interior, García Márquez's chronicle voice, Clavell's continental sweep.
He rode against my family. This is the first true thing.
The Most Recent Play
December 2024 · England · The boy on Belmont Road
A documentary-verse play in five acts, with four choral poems. Southampton, three weeks to Christmas. An eighteen-year-old walks home from a football social and does not arrive — and what England does with the space afterward is the play.
The play does not depict the killing, does not enter the courtroom, and takes no position on any active legal proceedings. It asks what a country builds in the space between a boy’s last filmed moment and the first cry his neighbours hear — the riots of the summer before, the migrant hotels on the coast, the half-buried Rotherham failure, the screen owned by one man six time zones west. Hold all of it at once. That is the only honest way to hold it.
The boy is the fact. What was built on the fact — that is the play.
The New Novel · Seeking Representation
The same family. The same promise. Carried to another sun.
A literary science-fiction novel, complete at 49,600 words: a Tejano One Hundred Years of Solitude aboard a generation ship, where the magical realism is just general relativity.
Six hundred years after the harness-maker’s son made his stand at the fork of two rivers, his descendants are still crossing. The generation ship La Villa de San Miguel del Cielo is braking toward the first living world humankind has ever found — and sixteen-year-old Ana Curbelo Flores, apprentice Chronicler, must testify before a divided ship on the question six centuries of crossing never settled: whether they have the right to land at all. The cycle that began in a burning harbor reaches, at last, the stars. The science is load-bearing rather than decorative: light-lag makes grief literal, and relativity puts the dead not behind the living but in the next room.
No están detrás de nosotros. Están en otra habitación.
Representation & Inquiries
For rights, representation, and press inquiries:
cronista@vicentegabrielflores.comThe Family · 1730 — 2026
Four families, twelve documented generations, two ocean crossings — the record beneath the novel.
His hand. Now mine.
Austin · 2026
From the family chart of Alfredo C. Flores, who nominated and successfully inscribed these ancestors into the El Paso County Historical Society's Hall of Honor.