Alfredo Véa Jr. is a criminal-defense lawyer who has been in private practice in San Francisco since 1986. In 1989, while Véa was working on a death-penalty case in a small town in the central valley ("an incredibly racist place," he recalled in an unpublished June 1995 interview with María Teresa Márquez), a judge commented that he was not aware that Mexican lawyers existed. Sensing a need for "something that endures, something to touch," Véa turned his controlled anger toward a constructive end: he rented a trailer for the duration of the trial and began writing the novel La Maravilla (The Wonder), which was published in 1993. "I began to write about ancestry," Véa says, "about archetypes that were not European, about forms that persist. I began with the most remarkable image in my possession: the image of my grandmother...