Alfredo Véa was born in the desert near Phoenix, Arizona "around 1950; nobody knows"[3] to Lorenza Carvajal, a thirteen year old of Yaqui and Spanish ancestry.
[1] His mother, who had left him with her parents when he was six (his father having never been a part of the picture), returned when he was ten to take him with her to her new family in California, where he worked as a migrant farmworker alongside Mexican and French Canadian braceros and where he learned to read and write from his Filipino friends.
[1] Eventually, he was placed in Livermore High School at the 10th-grade level, and was mentored by a teacher named Jack Beery, to whom Véa dedicated La Maravilla.
[1][2] After high school, Véa attended the University of California, Berkeley and spent some time living among the Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico, but was drafted into the Army and sent to the Vietnam War in 1968.
One of his colleagues describes him as "a renaissance trial attorney" who, while in court, "would draw upon his vast interests and knowledge of the classics, literature and, in particular, the struggles of people of color.