Justice Meets the Single Story

There is a singular danger in letting "one story become the only story," warns the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie. The "single story" promotes stereotypes which restrict the imagination, and ultimately limit the world. Her autobiographical critique begins from her perspective as a Nigerian child fed only British and American children's books who reproduces those worlds in her own early literary efforts. She moves on to address the single stories of others that she once accepted, but rejected when confronted with a broader reality, whether the poverty of a houseboy's family or the popular vision of the Mexican as the "abject immigrant."

"Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become," Adichie claims, some fifty years after the publication of her fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Achebe's debut novel is often lauded as the first significant archetypal and modern African novel written in English. His work and others led the young Adichie to finally "write about things [she] recognized." Just now, her warning seems especially relevant to Mexican American writers, as we stand at a similar historical, political, and cultural distance from the publication of José Antonio Villarreal's 1959 novel Pocho, arguably the first definitive and recognizable Chicano novel.

This, along with other defining canonical texts so important to the development of storytelling about the Mexican American experience, has established a voice where once there was none, it has echoed loudly over time. But the echo has a limit, where it becomes tedious, imprecise, too easy. The tropes, images, scenes, and characters that were innovative can seem, when replicated today, to induce claustrophobia, as if Mexican Americans can live only in a single house of fiction in a segregated neighborhood, outfitted with standard Mexican American models right out of Honest Sancho's Used Mexican Lot from Luis Valdez' acto, Los Vendidos (1967). "Write what you know" becomes a dangerous variant, "write what people think they know about you." Write the single story, now that you've read it, taught it, lived in the echo chamber.

Alfredo Véa's novel Gods Go Begging defies the single story. It is not easy or simple. It is not a story we expect. But it is one of the stories we should read and teach. Véa was born on an Arizona Indian reservation where his Mexican grandparents had a home. The author, too, with a multicultural heritage, challenges simple definition.

Gods Go Begging, Véa's third novel, was named one of the best books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. It is a tour-de-force steeped in magic realism and bold, irreverent humor, immersed in history, philosophy, literature, culture—a story that matters in big ways, a story students have yet to read or hear, a challenge to the hegemony of the single story. It is written, my students concluded, as if the author thought he'd never write another book and had to put into this one all he had to say.

Véa offers archetypal characters as well as several recognizable narrative styles and genres in one novel. He gives us a murder mystery, war story, police procedural, bildungsroman—a sprawling novel of ideas set in a defiantly vigorous multicultural America, and finally, a Mexican American novel written by a Mexican American writer.

Gods Go Begging is the story of Jesse Pasadoble, a Vietnam combat vet who returns physically sound but psychically wounded. He becomes a public defender, fighting for justice he never found in the war. He embraces a chance at overdue redemption defending a teenage African American boy accused of double murder. Pasadoble begins to see in his client the soldier boys who fought and died alongside him. The boy's impoverished life in a ghetto on San Francisco's Potrero Hill echoes the long ago doomed battle on a hill in Vietnam. Pasadoble puts it all together when he visits the neighborhood as police exhume bodies:

Like so many young men in...