Alfredo Vea Jr.'s 1993 novel "La Maravilla" depicts a 1950s squatter community on the edge of Phoenix. The community, Buckeye Road, questions notions of U.S. American identity as middle-class, WASP, and heterosexual. Buckeye can easily be viewed as a romanticized utopia that offers an alternative to consumer capitalism, urban sprawl, the disintegration of community, and the loss of spiritual values in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue, however, that the novel consistently undercuts both its own romanticism and our romanticized readings of it. (Contains 7 notes.)