SCENES FROM LA FRONTERA | July 1st 2008

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America is building 700 miles of fence along its border with Mexico. Lawsuits are flying in Texas, where the fence could change the lives of millions of people on both sides. Erica Grieder, the south-west correspondent for The Economist, collects stories along the border from Brownsville to El Paso ...

In a tiny town at the very bottom of the United States, a little old lady is sassing the Border Patrol about Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

"You'll find out that Chertoff and I don't see eye-to-eye," says Eloisa Tamez.

"Yes, ma'am," says the agent.

"Your boss. My enemy," she says.

That attitude is common down here. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 calls for 700 miles of fence to be built along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. When the DHS started building the fence in Arizona, there were few direct complainants, but that border is mostly uninhabited.

The Texas border, conversely, is studded with twinned cities, from Brownsville-Matamoros at the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso-Ciudad Juárez at the western tip of Texas. More than 2m people live in the El Paso-Juárez conurbation alone.

And Texas, unlike the other border states, already has a physical border with Mexico--the Rio Grande. In some places the river is barely a trickle, but it's there. Construction on the fence is supposed to start in Texas in July, but DHS has to deal with some lawsuits first.

The Border Patrol agent shifts awkwardly. He seems embarrassed and aggrieved: "I don't know why you're upset with me. I'm just seeing how you're doing." He is a recent recruit, a big blond kid from Oklahoma, and this is his first encounter with Ms Tamez.

They will probably meet again. She can often be found along this dirt road, which covers the levee. The Border Patrol dislikes people coming this close to the border, but it's her property. She lives in a modest house in El Calaboz, perhaps 50 yards from where we're standing, and lately she's been giving a lot of tours of her backyard.

Ms Tamez's family was given this land in 1767 as part of a Spanish land-grant programme. She thinks that only the King of Spain should be able to rescind her rights to it, but over the years the original porcione has been hacked away for various reasons. She retains claim to only three acres, and plans call for the fence to go right through it.

She is suing the DHS, saying that they did not follow correct procedure in asserting the government's eminent-domain claims. "I saw my father and grandfather working hard to get this land to give fruit. So it's not about how much money they might give me, which is nothing," she says.

Most property owners down here are not suing. Some are too poor for legal help; others quail at the prospect of taking on the government. But several are. Pamela Taylor sailed from England to Texas after the second world war because she had married a soldier from Brownsville, a nearby town. She has been living here for more than 50 years. Once she came home to find a man who had just crossed the river sitting in her rocking chair. Her home will be entirely behind the fence.

Paul and Tim Loop, a pair of farming brothers, don't know how they are going to access their crops. Residents of Granjeno, a tiny town with just one business, worry that their community will be entirely obliterated.

"We get so concerned about the animals that are about to be extinct," Ms Tamez continues, "when by doing this they are extinguishing a culture and a population that's going to be gone forever." She is a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, but she is referring more generally to the culture of la frontera, a strip of land that has switched hands often and has a blend of Anglo, Spanish, and Native American traditions.

The animals are also a point of concern. The border is home to obscure species like ocelots and green jays. Mr Chertoff has been given special dispensation to waive certain laws to get the fence built quickly, and he has used this power to ignore several environmental regulations.

On June 23rd the Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by the Sierra Club focusing on the impact of a section of fence in Arizona. The court may have reasoned that since the fence was already built the damage was done. There is another lawsuit pending focusing on the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Maybe the jays still have a chance.

(Erica Grieder is the south-west contributor to The Economist. This column is part of a week-long diary about the Texas-Mexico border, published on Economist.com