APACHE WOMAN HAS KEY TO NEW US BORDER WALL

SAN BENITO: She does not identify as Mexican or American. Eloisa Tamez is Lipan Apache and her ancestors owned this land a century before the war that imposed the boundary between Mexico and Texas. Now a hulking border wall crosses her backyard, something she says feels like a “violation.” That part of her property, in the border town of El Calaboz in southeast Texas, is a vacant area split down the middle by the rusty iron fence, which stands 18 feet ( 5.5 meters) high. Since it was impossible to build the wall in the middle of the Rio Grande River, which marks the natural border with Mexico, US federal authorities built it a couple of kilometers north of the riverbank. That meant some of the lands through which the wall already passes— and will continue to be built, if President Donald Trump gets his way— are owned by native tribes and private farmers. This is what happened almost 10 years ago to Tamez, a nursing professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a tribal rights activist. When federal authorities installed their fence, they divided her land not exactly in half. Then they gave her a key to open the gate that allows her to access the other side of her ancestral land, 1.2 hectares of desert dotted with cactus and mesquite. That is all that is left of the 1.2 hectares that once belonged to their Lipan Apache ancestors since the 18th century, thanks to a land grant from the Spanish crown.