La Toma: The Night Villa Came to Juárez

La Toma, PASADOR, and A King's PromiseOn the night of November 14, 1913, Pancho Villa took Ciudad Juárez without firing the first shot. He hid two thousand men inside the cars of a captured coal train and rode it straight into the sleeping city.La Toma tells that night — and tells it from the other side of the river.In 1980, on a porch in El Paso, an old man named Carlos Flores sits with his six-year-old grandson and finally tells him what he saw when he was nine: the night the family's world ended. The Floreses were not the people Villa came to liberate. They were a landed family — Canarian settlers under a king's grant, joined to the Stephenson silver fortune, holders of the alcaldía of Juárez. When Villa came north, he came against them.This play does not look for a version of that night in which the family was innocent. There isn't one. It looks instead for the harder, truer thing — what it means to receive a debt honestly, and to say plainly: we were on the wrong side, and the man who came to collect was the son we did not know we had.Moving between an alcalde's office, a cantina, a kitchen, a wooden bridge, and a hotel lobby, La Toma gives Pancho Villa his full moral weight — a man who, in the dark outside a sleeping enemy's door, chooses conscience over the gun. Written in verse and prose, bilingual and unflinching, it is a reckoning staged as a single unforgettable night.La Toma is a companion to the novel PASADOR and part of Vicente Gabriel Flores's cycle A King's Promise — plays bound by one family, one border, and one conviction: Lo que se te da nunca es la cosa. Lo que construyes con ello — esa es la cosa. Read more