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Access denied: demolishing the footbridge that connected Candelaria to the Mexican town of San Antonio del Bravo was supposed to put a dent in drug traffic and illegal immigration. Instead it's made life even tougher for citizens of this desolate corner of Big Bend.

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Driving 25 miles an hour down the main paved road of Candelaria you can enter and exit the town in 67 seconds, chased most of the way by two barking dogs. There is no square in this border village, no mayor, no park, no grocery or tavern. A single seventeen-pew church (Catholic, of course) stands next to an abandoned two-room schoolhouse, just a short walk from a former store dating to 1912. About 70 people live in the isolated town, and only 7,700 inhabit the surrounding county of Presidio, just west of Big Bend. Most villagers get by on a few hundred dollars a month, so it's hardly a surprise that only 2 people in town have long-distance telephone service. One of them allows her neighbors to make calls, a courtesy that has made her incredibly popular, since no one can afford a cell phone and, anyway, reception is pretty much a joke.

Survival on this ruthless stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert has always required interdependence, and for Candelaria that has meant reliance on San Antonio del Bravo (population of about 170), on the other side of the river. San Antonio del Bravo has a free health clinic that prescribes medicine for walk-in patients from Mexico and the U.S. (Its residents keep the operation running with donations and volunteers.) Candelaria, meanwhile, has better roads--meaning they are not absolutely hellish-which residents from San Antonio del Bravo use to access U.S. grocery stores and public schools for their American-born children. For as long as anyone can remember, these two villages have operated as one. To ease the journey from one side to the other, locals simply walked across a metal-framed bridge, about four feet wide and forty feet long, which they built and paid for themselves years ago.

Despite complaints from far away about a porous border, this close relationship was never frowned upon in the area. Quite the opposite: For many years the crossing was an unmanned, authorized Class B port of entry. Even after 1996, when a renewed Code of Federal Regulations document no longer included the footbridge as a legal entry point, the new status was more evident on paper than on the ground. (Michael Cronin, who...

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