But as Romney clumsily half-courts the Hispanic vote, conditions at our southern border are growing more dire. The brutal drug-related violence that has long gripped Mexico is on the rise. Two weeks ago, 49 bodies missing their heads, hands and legs were found near Monterey, Mexico.  A message left nearby indicated the Zetas cartel was responsible. One week earlier, 18 dismembered bodies were found in Guadalajara. One week before that, 23 bodies, with indications of torture, were found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border. They are casualties of an apocalyptic drug war, a thriving human smuggling trade and, more broadly, a deeply dysfunctional relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.

Both Romney’s rhetoric and this recent rise in violence belie our extraordinarily schizophrenic attitudes toward immigration and the Mexican border. But according to Steven Bender, law professor at Seattle University, those can be fixed. In his new book, “Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings,” Bender takes a historical look at the north- and southbound journeys that citizens of both countries have taken since the U.S. and Mexican boundaries were defined. He argues that much of our border policy is determined by long-held stereotypes of the Mexican crosser – the lazy immigrant coming to gouge social services, the sly immigrant coming to steal jobs, or the criminal immigrant endangering American communities – when, in fact, the vast majority of Mexican immigrants come to work for their own survival and that of their families. Bender also makes clear that Mexican workers are possibly more crucial to the American economy now than they’ve ever been.

“Run for the Border” calls for a more honest and, in Bender’s words, “compassionate” border policy that can make both the United States and Mexico safer and stronger.

So far, border policy and, to an extent, immigration reform don’t seem to have become as prominent in this election cycle as they were in 2008. Do you agree? And why do you think that is?

I think both Democrats and Republicans realize that they’re at an impasse and that there’s little political capital to be gained by pushing forth immigration reform, particularly comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats are going to resist anything that’s too restrictive, and Republicans are going to resist anything that has anything involving what they would term “amnesty,” which would include the DREAM Act.  So, even portions of immigration reform that have previously been bipartisan – such as the DREAM Act – are stymied awaiting the election.

Four years ago, on the other hand, there was an assumption that we would finally turn as a nation to resolve the problem of immigration reform. But quickly, with states like Arizona and Alabama taking their own action, the dynamics of immigration within the U.S. shifted, and then the global economic crisis hit. Traditionally, it’s very difficult to have realistic, meaningful, compassionate immigration reform in times of economic turmoil. And now that we seem to be starting to emerge from the economic distress, the onset of election season politics has further stymied reform. It’s really a matter of getting past the election and going [forward] from there.

There are enormous differences between how the U.S. deals with its Mexican and Canadian borders. Since the middle of the Bush administration, our restrictions on the Canadian border have become tighter, but they are still much more lax than those on the Mexican border, even though a fair amount of marijuana is trafficked into the U.S. from Canada.

That’s correct. And it’s interesting that in the wake of 9/11, even though none of the 9/11 terrorists had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, we have focused so much energy on the southern border as a gateway, presumably for terrorists. There has really been only one possible terrorist link to the U.S.-Mexico border since 9/11, yet we have focused so much in terms of resources and technology and wall building on that border in the name of homeland security. It’s today’s face of immigration – the Mexican face – that explains why there is so much emphasis on walling off Mexico rather than Canada.

[Also] interesting in relation to Canada is that, in the last couple of weeks, the Canadian paper The Globe has run a series on Canada’s immigration woes. The editorial that opened the series stated that Canada needs one million immigrants, in the short-run, to handle the necessary jobs, given the aging population. That is, of course, completely opposite from the tenor of the debate in the United States, where we view immigrants as somehow coming in and stealing jobs to which they’re not entitled.

Recently we’ve learned that more than half of babies born in the U.S. are now non-white. How do you think the country’s changing demographics will affect the way we think about border policy and immigration?

Well, at the same time that Anglo births are decreasing, the Mexican birthrate is also decreasing. But rather than comparing, it’s important to note that ultimately we may be in the same position as Canada, in terms of needing more young, viable immigrant labor. And, given the contributions of immigrants to the overall birth rate (including immigrants from all countries), and in light of the pressing needs of our social security system, our need to compete in the global economy, and the needs of the housing market, we ought to celebrate the fact that we still remain viable as a country, in large part due to immigrant births.

The American military has been experimenting with drone technology on the border for years.  There are now concerns that border vigilantes – on the U.S. side – could begin to use drones, which are already being purchased by police departments. 

There’s a long history, particularly in the U.S. and on the Arizona-Mexico and Texas-Mexico borders, of vigilantes. Most recently, the Minuteman Project vigilante campaign was really the precursor to Arizona’s immigration law — SB1070. There were a number of documented instances where the Minuteman project and ranchers exceeded the U.S.’s lawful bounds. As for drones, there are some chilling comparisons to the use of drones in Asia and the European Union. Considering the possibility that the border could some day be patrolled by drones, it’s important for us to ask this question: If, as I posit in my new book, undocumented workers who are crossing the border are among the most virtuous of border crossers, how is a drone going to evaluate and assess virtue? Not at all. The drone is going to be programmed simply to keep [border crossers] out, whether they are bringing drugs or they’re coming to work in U.S. fields and factories. So, I fear that.

You argue that Americans need to reduce demand for drugs, rather than simply cracking down on the supply. How do we do that?

We’re basically the biggest drug user in the world [sitting] next to a poor supplier country, Mexico. One of the ways to reduce demand is through selective legalization. The funds that our country would accrue through that change could be used for greater intervention and treatment – which is part of the answer to your question. But I also suggest the possibility of a moral imperative for U.S. residents to take greater responsibility for the mounting death toll in Mexico from the drug wars, and, in light of that, to really re-think drug use from that perspective.

The book argues that American cultural and economic needs can converge with those of Mexico, leading to a “compassionate” border policy.   

Yes. There are a number of grounds on which the economic (and other) interests of U.S. residents converge with a border policy that expands lawful immigration. Such a policy would assist the ailing social security system, address the need for replacement laborers, [and] aid the housing market – which depends on entry-level buyers. Increased immigration is also a way of competing with emerging economies, such as China and India. Immigrants are going to be essential for remaining competitive in a global market place.

You believe that immigrant populations can have a “renaissance” effect on economically depressed U.S. cities. Where has this happened? 

I think virtually every city that’s lately experienced a boost in immigration has experienced the potential for a renaissance that they may not recognize because immigrants tend to be far more entrepreneurial than other residents, in terms of everything from starting new restaurants and stores to running other businesses. Particularly when you’re looking at an infusion of immigrants into a place where there’s otherwise been a population exodus – the Rust Belt area, for example — and notably in places that have also been regions of backlash against immigration, such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania. These areas have failed to recognize the potential renaissance in their communities [due to] immigrants.

Many American corporations take advantage of the maquiladora structure – Mexico’s largely unregulated manufacturing system. Like American illegal immigrants, workers in maquiladoras lack the legal protections that most American workers take for granted. But are they worse off than undocumented Mexican laborers in the U.S.?

The laws between the United States and Mexico – considering the flashpoints of environmental protections and labor laws – are fairly similar, but in practice they’re quite different. Through corruption and through lack of resources for enforcement, environmental and labor protections that we take for granted in the United States are easily subverted in Mexico. And so the workers in [Mexico's] factories and the citizens in surrounding communities face worse environmental hazards and receive lower real wages, particularly in the borderlands communities where the cost of living is not much lower than across the border in the United States. Those workers have a very difficult time making ends meet. And that’s what prompts the allure of making a few dollars an hour vs. a few dollars a day; and that’s what has prompted, over recent years, particularly since NAFTA, a very strong push of immigrants across the border looking for jobs in the United States. The maquiladoras also benefit Mexico in particular ways. Certainly they provide, and have provided, a number of jobs that pay better than many other jobs in Mexico. At the same time, they have contributed to the uprooting of families from the interior of the country. They have been sites of labor abuses, and they’ve contributed to environmental degradation in the communities they’re found in.

They may also be to blame for the huge amount of murders of civilian women in Juarez. Some have noted that the poor treatment of women has been so institutionalized, through the factories, that murder somehow becomes acceptable. 

Yes. It’s the idea that was suggested by a law professor, Elvia Arriola, who has extensively studied the impact of the maquiladoras on women, particularly on the hundreds of unsolved murders – what is a femicide in Juarez over the years. She contends that the culture of subordination of workers, particularly that of female workers – who are desired by the employers because, among other things, they are perceived as less likely to object to the miserable working conditions – has contributed to a subordination of women in the broader community and to a local culture that does not value their lives and is not concerned with solving these mass deaths.

Many U.S. citizens go to Mexico to retire, which, as you discuss, has a complicated effect on the Mexican economy. There are benefits to an influx of relatively wealthy people, but there are also very specific ways that it harms the Mexican economy.  

Yes. Like the maquiladora experience in Mexico, the influx of U.S. residents as retirees, or even as buyers of second homes and vacation homes, really leaves a conflicted economic record. Certainly there’s a boost to the local economy, with the initial building of these retirement and other homes, but that tends to be a fleeting economic presence, and if anything it drives up prices and really excludes Mexican residents from the prime real estate. You have this dichotomy then between the sort of walled-in southern-California-type oasis that’s inhabited by the retirees and the working-class housing of the laborers on the other side of the walled-in community. And that’s a dichotomy that we find in the United States as well, but it’s a particularly stark contrast in these Mexican retirement havens.

A running theme of the book seems to be that the Mexican government has tended to make border policy decisions that are rational in terms of economic self-interest, while the U.S. government has behaved in its own self-interest, with an added slice of irrationality based on stereotypes and fears. How do you think race plays into the decisions of our government?  

One of the main ways it plays out here is in how we undervalue immigrant labor. The Mexican face has become the face of immigration, and we simply don’t see virtue in Mexican border crossers, whether they’re coming for jobs (which is most often the case) or for other purposes. We tend to view their entrance in a derogatory way: that they are coming to either commit crime through drug dealing or to wrest public services away from more deserving populations. That’s the lens through which we view immigration proposals, and that’s why there have been such stymied efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. It’s because of the Mexican face of immigration and how racialized that debate has become.

There is a dynamic that has emerged in the immigration debate in which, while it might be improper in some civilized settings to make overt racialized attacks on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, by couching the attack as against “undocumented immigrants,” anything goes.  Anything can be said with impunity about “undocumented immigrants” because they’re being discussed as a group that is apparently not racialized. But in fact we all know that the things that are said about immigrants are being said about Mexicans.

The war on drugs has narrowed down the cartels to the most efficient and brutal groups, and violence against civilians in Mexico is increasing. What can be done?

The Mexican government needs to return to its long-standing policy – what is unfortunately a policy of corruption, but a less bloody solution – of treating the drug cartels more as businessmen, similar to how the United States treats the alcohol industry. I don’t suggest that lightly, but with the mounting death toll, that’s a reasonable compromise that makes more sense and that better serves Mexico.

Wouldn’t such a policy would allow for greater competition and decreased profits for the few cartels currently in power? 

I think what the drug cartels would be most opposed to would be selective decriminalization or legalization of drugs in the United States, particularly of marijuana, which might alone account for 60 percent of cartel profits in Mexico. That is what would scare the cartels to death: If we on the other side of the border finally tackled the elephant in the room of decriminalization and legalization beyond medicinal marijuana.

As for decreased criminalization within Mexico, I believe the cartels prefer whatever leads to more chaos. If lives are viewed as expendable, then there is potential for profit in great chaos.  So, I think that some of the cartels would, I agree, be opposed to increased legality within Mexico because they would lose that advantage of profit and the chaos that ensues today.

It seems unlikely that anti-immigration sentiment can be changed through policy alone, and that we may need vigorous public re-education before we can manage to get legislators to change policy in the first place.  

I agree. I think that to begin to address the derogatory image of the immigrant, before there can be anything along the order of compassionate immigration reform, we need to re-learn who these migrants are.  And I think that happens in face-to-face local settings, where people begin to hear the stories of these workers, begin to realize the compelling human interests that are driving them, and begin to recognize, really, the desperation that comes with poverty and that the immigrant’s search is really a search for the American dream. I think that when those dialogues occur, one-to-one, person-to-person, face-to-face, the image of the migrant can change into one of a virtuous contributor to the U.S. economy.

But given that xenophobic sentiment seems to be on the rise in some parts of the country, this seems difficult. In Arizona, people are going to have interactions with immigrants regardless of whether they wish to or not, but plenty of people who strongly oppose immigration live far from the border or immigrant populations – they could be in Appalachian Ohio, for example. They might not have any of these interactions. 

I actually think that the long-term is going to demand leadership from political leaders, community leaders, and civic leaders. And it’s going to need to happen in what I could call bastions of hate, which include parts of Arizona and places such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmer’s Branch, Texas, and parts of the South. That’s where these dialogues are going to have to take effect, and unfortunately it’s not an overnight thing.  In the meantime, people are dying crossing the border, and people are dying in the drug war. And while my book calls for, in the first instance, an immediate halt to the bloodshed while policies are transformed, realistically the blood is going to continue to flow while we hold these crucial debates and while we rethink what it means to be an American.

In handmade posters hung in various places around the state, the Knights Templar announced their plan to renounce violence during Pope Benedict XVI’s three-day sojourn to Mexico this weekend. The posters, which were hung near busy intersections and pedestrian bridges, announced their “welcome” to the pope and renounced any “violent action” during his visit. Translated into English, their signs read:

The Knights Templar renounces any military or violent action. We are not murderers. We welcome the pope.

So far, with the pope one day into his visit, the truce has apparently held (though the Knights Templar kept up the killings until the day of his arrival). Though brief, the renunciation of violence is an atypical move for a drug ring that is as idiosyncratic as it is brutal. Recruiting many of its members from nearby rehabilitation centers, the Knights prohibit members from using drugs, and despite their well-documented history of violence, are devoutly religious. Among its requirements is a mandatory initiation that requires potential members to perform a blood ritual and dress up in the medieval garb that inspires their name.

At the same time, the Knights Templar is regarded as one of the most notoriously brutal cartels in the country, second only to the “Zetas,” a drug ring formed in the early ’90s that controls much of western Mexico. Reliance on violent tactics have helped the Knights Templar establish one of the largest amphetamine trafficking schemes in record time: The cartel was only founded last spring as an offshoot of La Familia Michoacana, another cartel.

When they first announced themselves, the Knights hung more than 40 banners, or narcomantas, across the state with a message promising security. “Our commitment is to safeguard order, avoid robberies, kidnapping, extortion, and to shield the state from rival organizations,” they said.
Their first killing happened days later. Now the leading cartel in the state, the Knights have proven their dominance in meth trafficking. near the area, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Beltran Leyva organization. Most citizens of Michoacán refuse to talk openly about the Knights Templar. Those who do speak cautiously, saying the cartel never harmed the community or complaining about constant presence of the federal police.
The pope, for his part, will take up the issue of drug violence on Sunday. According to the New York Times, he’ll blame the violence on traffickers’ greed. Then on Monday he’ll take off for Cuba — and for Michoacán, the drug war will resume.

Few issues bring the contrast into focus as sharply as abortion. Mexico City legalized abortion; Guanajuato cracks down hard on any signs of it.

Maria Lopez (not her real name) got pregnant in Leon in 2008 when she was 19, and she couldn’t afford to bring up a child at that time. She took the drug misoprostol, used for chemically induced abortions in many Western countries, to provoke a miscarriage. She ended up in an emergency room with severe abdominal pains.

“A doctor arrived to examine me, and she opened my legs almost in anger, saying ‘let’s see what you’ve done,’” says Lopez, now 22.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital reported her to the authorities. She was arrested and imprisoned. She was later released on bail and served a nine-month sentence under house arrest.

Between 2000 and 2010, 168 women have been jailed for having abortions or miscarriages in the state of Guanajuato. Some of them were incarcerated on homicide charges. Currently some 30 women are under investigation here for aborting their pregnancies or miscarrying, sometimes through natural causes, according to non-profits.

Nearly one in five pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriages.

“We believe that it’s the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that represents the biggest obstacle to access to safe abortion for Mexican women,” says Maria Consuela. She is the director of a non-profit organization called “Catholics for the Right to Decide,” which campaigns for women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

In 2007, Mexico City legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, angering the Catholic Church. In response, and with encouragement from the church, 16 Mexican states adjusted their constitutions to protect the fetuses, beginning at the moment of conception and turning abortion — technically — into murder.

Abortion is permitted across Mexico in extreme circumstances such as when a woman has been raped, the fetus shows signs of serious deformities, or the pregnancy puts a women’s life at risk. But those monitoring such cases say authorities often fail to fulfill their obligation.

Women in conservative states like Guanajuato who visit hospitals or clinics with pregnancy complications often face suspicion — whether they’ve had an abortion or not.

“In Leon, they start to question you, accusing you of provoking the situation, and they try to investigate you to see if you did,” says Eugenia Lopez, director of the feminist sexual rights non-profit Balance.

Mexico is estimated to have the world’s second largest Catholic population after Brazil, but Catholic Mass attendance is shrinking.

The issue of abortion has divided Mexico. Most approve only of abortion in certain circumstances such as after rape, according to a survey by Catholics for the Right to Decide.

“We don’t want to end innocent lives,” says Irene Lopez, a Mexican housewife.

Yet those women who can afford it travel to the capital from other parts of the country to end their unwanted pregnancies legally and safely.

Veronica Cruz, founder of the Guanajuato-based women’s rights group Las Libres (the Free), says that women with money can get abortions secretly in private hospitals in most Mexican states. It is poor, young women who are being criminalized, she says.

“Poor women have to go to cheaper, backstreet clandestine services that aren’t hygienic where they risk their health and their lives,” says Cruz. “And these women are at risk of losing both their lives and their liberty because they are then denounced by medical staff when they seek medical help following complications.”

Mexican law separates the church and state, and priests are supposed to be barred from preaching politics from the pulpit.

But with a general election looming in July, Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church issued guidelines on how Mexicans should vote, emphasizing they place prime importance on “the right to life, starting at conception.”

As long as abortion remains illegal and taboo in some Mexican towns, women like Maria Lopez will continue to be criminalized.

“The priests say that you should have all of the children that God sends you,” she says, “and I say OK well if God sends me 20 children should I have them even though I can’t feed them?”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the push and pull of growing up biracial in America. In the Mexican side of my family I was known as the white one. Even though I spoke Spanish, it was the formal kind learned from classrooms and reading, rather than the one you pick up by bartering with local shop owners over the price of firm avocados, or arguing with parents over a ridiculous curfew. On the other side, my cousins called me a “Wexican,” a white Mexican despite my similarly toned skin.

Cooking, however, taught me to channel my frustrations by creating foods through the addition of sour cream, cilantro, cayenne pepper and tender meat. I could make a food that doesn’t have to be Mexican or American.

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Since I was 6, my cultural anthropologist father took me on his research projects along the border in South Texas. He wanted to show me the tiny corner in his hometown that birthed the iconic Latino food: the nacho.

We ended our 14-hour drive from Colorado as the sun began to set behind the sandy wasteland known as West Texas. We pulled into the Best Western for refuge, the only hotel for almost a hundred miles. The Anglo man gawked at my dark-skinned father and his freckled child, and answered our unasked question: “We’re out of rooms.” He shuffled his papers to avoid eye contact. As my father dragged me closer to the counter, he strengthened his grip on my tiny hand and asked why the parking lot was empty if they were out of rooms.

“Conference,” the man said, glaring at my father and me without blinking.

We spent the night on a ratty mattress supported by cinder blocks at another motel a few miles away. When dawn came, we started our trip again as if nothing happened.

“I hate white people,” I muttered as we approached the sign welcoming us to my dad’s hometown, Eagle Pass. He jerked the car off the road and pounded the brake. He sighed, wiped the sweat from his forehead and glasses, and demanded that I never utter those words again. “How would your mother feel if she heard you say that?” he said.

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We arrived at our destination, Eagle Pass, Texas. We weaved through the bustling streets of downtown, lined with banks, money exchanges and a line outside of the local meat market and bakery that snaked past a convenience store where people bought icy Cokes while they waited. From here, we saw the concrete bridge connecting Mexico and the United States over the Rio Grande River. During the ’60s, my dad crafted lures on both sides when he fished for catfish, carp, turtles and alligator. Now, the heat sensors and armed guards stop him from crossing as freely. We parked in front of an old hotel and began to wander around town.

Inside the Mancha Meat Market and Bakery, a sharp, sweet smell of caramelized sugar filled the room, emerging from the side ovens cooking sweet bread glazed in a strawberry coat. On Saturdays, however, the stench of bloody, uncooked cow head lurks toward the empanadas and sweet bread.

Barbacoa, slow-cooked beef, had served as the Mancha family’s specialty for 70 years. Every week they divide up several beef heads, place its remains in thigh-high containers, lower it into a hot pit, lined with mesquite coals, behind the bakery, and wake up at 6 a.m. the next morning to find the juicy aroma of tender meat, inviting you for a breakfast treat. On Sunday they used to sell well over a hundred pounds of meat for $3 a pound. Hordes of Mexican and Anglo mothers wait patiently to get their bounty for dinner that evening. There were only two weekends when Eagle Pass was left without barbacoa: once when elder Mancha died in the early ’90s from heart disease, and the other when his wife joined him several years later.

Being one of the first Hispanics to get a Ph.D. in his program at the University of Pennsylvania weighed down my father whenever he returned to Texas. He liked to keep his accomplishments tucked away from most people. When he stopped by his friends’ bakeries, banks and law offices in Eagle Pass they always greeted him with endearing shouts and playful insults. But underneath the handful of dinner invites and barbecues, he felt a gradual separation with his past.

Sometimes, I think my dad tries to repair his link back to Texas through his students, especially the minority ones. He directed the ethnic studies and chaired the anthropology departments, and in his spare time takes on a mentor role for the first generation and students of color. At lunch he sketches their life plans on ketchup-stained napkins and tells them not to take any crap from losers. Most of those students go to grad school or work as a professional in a high-powered “something.” Not once during these meetings did I ever hear him tell students how to go back to their old lives, Santa Fe, Detroit or Los Angeles, after college. Likely, he was trying to figure it out for himself.

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We trekked along the international bridge against a stationary line of cars waiting to enter the United States. Our two-hour wait in customs seemed like nothing compared to their four-hour wait in the unforgiving Texas heat. The sound of nearby dogs barking and angry shouting in Spanish caused me to jump, but before I could turn around, my dad tugged at my shirt, a signal for me to keep going.

The dim glow from the Moderno’s antique lamps and wooden tables made it feel like a speakeasy, rather than a restaurant. During the 1950s it served Mexican as the hangout for Mexican and Texas politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson and Maverick County Judge Roberto Bibb, conniving the different ways the Mexican vote would be delivered. As in those days, people still spent their dollars on beer, milanesa and, according to folk legend, the famous nachos, invented in this restaurant.

The waiter brought our mountain of freshly hot tortilla chips, each with some refried pinto beans, topped with a small slice of cheddar cheese and crowned with a deep green slice of jalapeno. We scarfed down the nachos like a horde of hungry javelinas. For the next 10 minutes we communicated in grunts and moans, only aware of the explosion of flavor in our mouths and the flow of dense cheese bubbling in our stomach.

The nacho, according to my father’s stories, represents the fusion between the Spanish colonizers’ new-world dairy and the Aztecs’ corn and chile. Throughout the centuries, the recipe morphed, first with the independence of Texas and California from Mexico, and then the immigration boom in the 20thcentury. By the 1980s, even though Cortez and Montezuma had withered into the pages of history, their spirits live on in the hot plates of these fried delicacies.

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In my junior year of college, I decided go on my own adventure south of the border. But this time, I flew past Piedras Negras and landed in Buenos Aires, where the Mexican restaurants left my mouth bitter and my wallet dry. The Argentine diet consists of rich cheese, juicy steak and fluffy bread, carried over by the millions of Western European immigrants at the beginning of the 20thcentury. The country’s distance and lack of immigrants from Mexico left Argentines confused over the simplest of Mexican dishes. The huevos rancheros scraped against my mouth, and the weak margarita left me thirsty. I missed spicy food so much, that my biweekly trip to the Bolivian vendor for jalapeños resembled a drug deal more than a produce purchase. Something needed to change.

So I started cooking. I spent the day before my feast assembling the ingredients from all over town. The Bolivian woman from down the street sold me the jalapeños, a 10-minute subway ride took me to the dietary shop where I bought dried black beans, and a long bus ride brought me to the only Mexican restaurant that hustled individual tortillas for a dollar apiece.

I made Guillermo cook the black beans, while I diced the tomatoes into fine cubes. Even though he claimed vegetarianism, he rarely ate beans and pulverized them in the skillet with childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. He never knew Mexican food beyond the posh restaurants in the gentrified neighborhood of the city, and saw this as an authentic way to learn about Mexican culture from a real live Mexican.

“I’m technically American, Guillermo,” I told him as I started slicing the avocados. “My dad is first generation and my mom is white. I’m considered Hispanic.”

“Well, you’re the only Mexican I know,” he said. “If you speak Spanish, cook Mexican food, and have Montaño as a last name, I don’t see how you could be anything else.”

The waterfall of beaten eggs I poured into the sizzling skillet engulfed the fried tortilla cubes, until the batter thickened.

“It’s a Mexican peasant dish,” I said sprinkling in the peppers. “When the ingredients in your house were just about to go bad, you threw them all in a pan and ate it.”

Guillermo and his friends took hearty spoonfuls from the skillet, and before I could stab a piece of egg for myself, they wanted more. I slathered the beans Guillermo flattened into a rough paste over a fried tortilla chip, topped it off with a thick piece of cheddar and a single jalapeño slice, and offered it to Guillermo. He ate it all in one greedy bite. After a few seconds of hurried chewing, he stopped, opened his mouth and screamed,

“IT’S TOO HOT! IT FEELS LIKE HELL ON MY TONGUE!” he said right before he gulped down two glasses of strong margaritas. Several hours later, and a bottle of tequila later, he passed out on his bed finally knowing what “real” Mexican food tasted like.

For the next couple of months in Argentina, I cooked regularly for my Argentine friends and told stories about cooking with my dad. The entire time, they noticed how my syntax and vocabulary differed from theirs. Even though I spoke Spanish as a second language, they always referred to me as their “Mexican friend.”

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My dad and I eat at Chipotle when we don’t feel like cooking or want to get out of the house. I order a veggie burrito stuffed with grilled peppers, wet black beans, sticky white rice and cheese. My dad usually orders the same, but tortilla-less, because of his doctor-mandated hypoglycemic diet. Even though he likes to call Chipotle “the Mexican PF Chang,” he likes the taste and befriended everyone who works there. We know the Mexican women behind the counter and we always tell stories about Piedras Negras, while they lament Mexico City and brag about their children winning college scholarships.

Even when I proclaim that much of “Casa de Mi Padre” is not funny on purpose, and that people who complain about that are missing the point — well, I might be missing the point too, right? Will Ferrell became rich and famous as an entertainer who makes people laugh, and the audience that wants to watch him push outside that box, into some anxious zone of post-Situationist conceptual art, is probably a lot smaller. But Ferrell has been moving in that direction for a while. I’d argue that his best bits in “Anchorman” or “Talladega Nights” or “The Other Guys” or even way back in “Old School” come when he stretches beyond conventional comedy into strange and uncomfortable places. (He also played a straight dramatic role last year, in the universally ignored alcoholism drama “Everything Must Go.”)

But let’s get back to my original question: Is “Casa de Mi Padre” brilliant or pointless? Indubitably it’s both, as Ron Burgundy might put it. It’s a parody of something so specific that it never quite existed in the first place: the Mexican telenovela plus the spaghetti western plus the straight-to-VHS action flicks of the ’70s, maybe. If you fell asleep in the hot-tub time machine and woke up stoned in 1982, this is the movie you’d find yourself watching on some UHF channel (right after the soccer match between Tigres and Toluca). Some of its gags absolutely fall flat — having a climactic action scene replaced with still photos of miniatures is pretty funny, while an on-screen note apologizing for it is not — but considered as a whole it’s a wonderful and hilarious phenomenon, most of it is executed to Dadaist perfection.

“Casa de Mi Padre” gets funnier as it goes along, especially if you’re paying enough attention to notice the constant continuity errors, editing glitches, mismatched musical cues and recycled backdrops. It’s funniest of all if you speak at least a little Spanish, the better to appreciate Ferrell’s perfectly stilted line readings — if you want to look at it this way, he’s playing a bad actor, playing a dumb but noble character, in another language — or the delicious supporting performances of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as a pair of slime-oozing narcotraficantes. I have no idea how “Casa de Mi Padre” will play with Latino and Latin American audiences, but as Rene Rodriguez’s largely sympathetic review in the Miami Herald suggests, they’re likely to get a lot more of the gags. (Initial release of this film is limited to 600 or so theaters, many of them in heavily Latino areas of the West and Southwest.)

Ferrell, Piedmont and Steele have faithfully captured a certain strain of ’70s and ’80s Mexican pop entertainment, in which the rise of the drug lords (fueled in their turn by Yankee greed) is contrasted with a highly sentimental depiction of the rugged and noble Mexican spirit. That spirit is here embodied in Ferrell’s stolid and none-too-bright Armando Alvarez, a rancher in the rural north who pines for the approval of his landowner papa (legendary Mexican film and TV actor Pedro Armendáriz Jr., in his final role) and yearns for a woman who will love the land and water and starlit skies as he does. Armando delivers this monologue straight into the camera, while inspirational music abruptly kicks into gear on the soundtrack and his father and his sleazy, sideburn-wearing brother Raul (Luna) shift uneasily on their feet. But Raul’s ultra-hot Mexico City girlfriend, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez, an actual Mexican soap star), is overcome with emotion. If no one else notices that she’s the woman for Armando, she does.

How you respond to that scene might determine how you feel about “Casa de Mi Padre.” It’s hammy, shamelessly melodramatic and technically inept (all of that intentionally) — but it’s supposed to work on you anyway, if you’ll let it. Similarly, a barroom confrontation between Armando, Raul and the supremely evil drug lord called La Onza (Bernal), begins as pure shtick and eventually becomes an evisceration of United States drug and immigration policy that would be completely impermissible in an American film. (I can’t remember which one of them first refers to Americans as a race of “shit-eating monster babies,” because I was laughing too hard.)

That moment of biting social criticism comes and goes, as does the dynamite norteño musical number “Yo No Se,” performed by Ferrell with Adrian Martinez and Efren Ramirez (playing a pair of loyal-sidekick ranch hands). There’s a completely unmotivated and splatterific shootout at a wedding, which tragically interrupts an awesome Spanish cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” performed by Venezuelan pop star José Luis Rodríguez (aka “La Puma”). There’s a vision quest led by an outrageously fake animatronic white leopard, and loaded up with the psychedelic, pseudo-Aztec claptrap that’s such a central element in Mexican pop culture. Then there’s the completely schizophrenic depiction of Americans, who are corrupt and mendacious morons in one scene, and John Wayne white knights in the next. (This movie was made by a bunch of gringos, but they’ve done their pinche homework.)

Inevitably, people are comparing “Casa de Mi Padre” to “Death Proof,” the fake ’70s exploitation flick that was Quentin Tarantino’s half of “Grindhouse.” (I would also suggest “Rubber,” French director Quentin Dupieux’s meta-meditation on the no-budget American horror film.) In both cases, asking what the point is becomes an unanswerable Zen koan: If you’re posing the question, the movie already didn’t work for you. I think the point of “Casa de Mi Padre” is that a major Hollywood comedy star made a preposterous and delightful low-budget movie in Spanish, for no reason except that the absurdity of the premise appealed to him, and because he wants to push his celebrity in unexpected directions. But maybe it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just that when Bernal’s unctuous drug lord makes a phone call from poolside, surrounded by girls in tiny bikinis, he uses exactly the right ultra-high-tech toy from 30-odd years ago, and it’s beautiful and funny and expresses a lot of things without saying a word, and that’s quite enough.