In Celebration of All Americans : Books: A Bay Area attorney-turned-novelist gives voice to those not commonly heard--poor people of vast cultural wealth.

Alfredo Vea Jr. thinks of his youth--of a teen-age migrant farm worker, sweating amid rows of sunbaked produce as America went past on the highways.

“That’s the image I remember most,” says the 43-year-old lawyer. “When I was working in the fields, people would drive by and stare at us. Sometimes they’d stop and stretch and watch us like we were in a zoo or from another planet.

“People do the same thing now with Arab markets, janitors, the people working in the carwash,” he observes. Yet, “When you add up all those people, they are most of the world.”

These are the people he has chosen to write about. A defense attorney specializing in murder cases, Vea is a new member of the attorney-turned-novelist club with “La Maravilla,” published this spring by Dutton. But unlike many lawyers who take up fiction, Vea has not written a courtroom thriller.

“I couldn’t write a book about attorneys in miniskirts and BMWs dashing off to do a pro bono criminal case. I don’t know those people. I don’t like those people and they don’t need somebody to speak for them,” he says.

“I’m writing for all these poor people in my life whom I love--all those farm workers, Hindus, Koreans, Filipinos, everybody--so they finally have one of their own who has the discipline and energy to say who they are.”

“La Maravilla” takes readers to Buckeye Road, a cardboard settlement without plumbing or electricity in the Arizona desert. Amid the material poverty, Vea sees cultural wealth. Here, races converge to create a vibrant slice of the American frontier, a multiethnic community where everyone samples the others’ traditions, words and music. There are Mexicans, Spaniards, Okies, Arkies, African-Americans and members of the Pima, Apache, Papago and Yaqui tribes.

His main character, 9-year-old Beto, has a grandfather who is Yaqui Indian. His grandmother, an immigrant from Spain, is a devout Catholic and a folk healer and is enchanted by African-American music. Neighbors live in sagging Cadillacs that don’t run. Among the other inhabitants are a prostitute whose lover was hanged by her father and a trailer full of transvestites.

Vea knows this place well. He lived there as a child. Or, as he puts it, “Mexico crept over the border and deposited me.”

Vea’s Mexican mother was 13 when he was born. Abandoned by her husband, she left her son on Buckeye Road with her parents when he was 6. Vea’s grandparents taught him through their stories of the “undercurrent of magic and mysticism that flowed from the Moors and the Gypsies of Spain and from the Rio Yaqui and the ancient Olmecs of Mexico.”

When Vea was 10, his mother returned and took him to California, where they followed the farm-labor circuit, introducing the child to another rich amalgam of cultures, including the Filipino workers in Stockton who gave Vea a set of encyclopedias and coached him in reading and writing in the evenings.

“All those people you meet in my book,” says Vea, “they are the reason I’m still not on Buckeye Road.”

Reviews have been mostly positive. “If there is a literary and socially conscious heaven, I know that John Steinbeck is looking down and grinning from ear to ear,” wrote Carolyn See in The Times.

“What’s happening to his novel is better than what happens with most first novels,” says Rosemary Ahern, Vea’s editor at Dutton, which expects a second printing. “It’s a brave book. It’s not a very conventional novel. Not too many people choose to write about these kinds of people, and he makes them the center of his book.”

Vea had sporadic formal education until high school. Teachers told him he would never attend college because he came from the fields. But a high school teacher in Livermore took an interest in him and helped kindle his intellect. He dedicated “La Maravilla” to this teacher, Jack Beery, who died last year. Beery had instructed Vea and his brothers in everything from academics to how to use a fork and knife.

Vea went on to UC Berkeley, and had to take time off from school in 1967 to earn money. While picking Brussels sprouts in Arizona, he was caught by the Vietnam draft and spent 16 months as an Army radioman on combat patrols.

“I can’t imagine not having that in my life,” Vea says of the duty. “You have to know who you are, because who you are might be someone capable of craven cruelty. In order to survive, you can kill an entire family, including the children; you are given the license, the uniform and every weapon under the sun. You could get away with anything, and that’s when you find out who you are. You realize that kindness and gentility are acts of will. You have to choose a side.”

After his discharge, Vea returned to Berkeley, where he earned a law degree while working nights. He volunteered with the United Farm Workers and worked as an attorney for Centro Legal de la Raza. After five years with the San Francisco public defender’s office, he started his own practice in 1986.

“I couldn’t write a postcard before I started doing this,” says Vea, nodding at a copy of his novel, which he began writing several years ago during a trial in Modesto. “It must be organic or something: A moment comes when you can do this. It was sort of a mania. I had season tickets to the Oakland A’s, and I didn’t go again to the games. I didn’t watch a football game for two years. The book was a joy. It was something I really wanted to do.”

Vea argues that the nation’s array of cultures is its soul. Those stripped of their culture cannot clothe themselves with an American one because there is none. In “La Maravilla,” he writes of lost Americans: “They become other religions like choosing a hat and become other names and have no connection to places they live. They become the things they own or the cars they drive. They have no stories. They have no tribe. Their campfire is the television.”

Talking about this theme, he says, “Every immigrant who comes here says, lose your language, lose your name. In order to be American, you have to become. What happens is, the next generation says, ‘Wait a second. Something’s missing here. This culture you want me to absorb is really not much.’ What it is, is a culture that says don’t have one.”

The result, says Vea, is a society that says, “if you speak English, are computer literate and can go out and get a job, you don’t need a culture; you don’t need any of your antecedents. I think that really hurts. It ravages us and we don’t even know that it does.”

Vibrant cultures, like the one along Buckeye Road, bring stability rather than divisiveness, Vea says. His book is “about missing that organic comfort in life. If you go back to your cultural life and look around, even if you’ve never been there before, there will be things you find that are comfortable. Things that you need.”

Vea will give readings from “La Maravilla” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Book Soup in West Hollywood and at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Midnight Special on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.