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.

- – - – - -

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.

- – - – - -

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.

- – - – - -

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.

- – - – - -

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.”

- – - – - -

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.

Which is what makes Robert Andrew Powell’s new book, “This Love Is Not for Cowards,” so gripping. It tells the bittersweet story of Juárez’s hapless professional soccer team, Los Indios, and the rabid fans who support them. The book reads like a mashup of Nick Hornby’s “Fever Pitch,” Bill Buford’s “Among the Thugs” and Charles Bowden’s grim 2010 survey of Juárez, “Murder City.”

Salon spoke to Powell — a journalist who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Mother Jones, among many other publications — from his home in Miami.

Why did you move to Juárez?

I had just squandered three years on a book project in Colorado that never made it into print. I had no job to speak of, and few prospects for freelance work. I had no girlfriend or wife or kids. I had no home, either; I was crashing on a friend’s couch in Miami. Oh, and I was broke, too.

In the context of my life at the time, moving to Juárez was fairly pragmatic. I was fascinated by the city. So many people were being murdered, day after day after day. I couldn’t get my head around it, and I wanted to check it out — no place seemed more relevant. It was dirt cheap. My U.S. cellphone could still pick up a signal in Juárez. And my home country would be literally within walking distance should I ever need anything.

Did you intend to write about the Indios?

No. I didn’t have a book deal, or any magazine assignments. All I knew for sure is that there was a soccer team in the city, that they played in the Mexican major league, and that they had an American on the team, midfielder Marco Vidal. Soccer was something I could understand. I couldn’t comprehend the violence before I moved there, but I could understand sports. I figured if I hung around the team the city would eventually reveal itself.

I’m a big proponent of what Gay Talese calls “the fine art of hanging out.” I knew Marco was an American, but until I got there, I didn’t know his Mexican father had entered Texas illegally, first trying to cross the Rio Grande in Juárez. I knew the owner of the team, Francisco Ibarra, was living in El Paso for his safety, but I didn’t know how painful it is for him to live in another country. I didn’t know an Indios coach would be murdered. I didn’t know that Marco would marry a young Juárez woman, or that her family would flee to El Paso in fear. I didn’t know that the Indios team would lose and lose and lose. If I hadn’t spent a ton of time simply hanging out, I wouldn’t have recognized that the losing could be a metaphor for the city. A lot bubbled up organically.

What did the players and coaches there make of you?

The head coach, every single time he would see me, would shake his head and laugh, like, What the fuck are you doing here, gringo? Why in the world was I volunteering to live in such a violent city? Why was I hanging around a losing team? But I just kept showing up. I went to every practice, every day. I flew with the team on road trips, staying in the same hotels, attending their meetings and sharing meals with them. I’d squeeze into the locker rooms on game days, quietly taking notes. Everyone eventually forgot I was there, or at least that I was working on a project that would someday become a book. It’s not my nature to take over a room. I like to hang back and observe. I like to watch.

There are moments in the book where you’re witness to intense violence. I’m thinking about the episode in which a guy you’re drinking with goes outside and viciously assaults another man, then runs back into the bar. Did you feel at all complicit?

Complicit? Nah. I wasn’t killing anyone. I didn’t beat anyone up. I rarely even raised my voice. But overwhelmed? Yep. Powerless? Sure. The violence was incredible, and it affected everything, even if I would go long stretches without seeing any dead bodies.

That was the surreal thing: how normal everything could seem, or at least how normal everyone tried to act. I’d go to practice, I’d get some lunch, I’d watch TV or go to a movie with my friends. Then the next morning I’d read in the newspaper that a dead body had been dumped on my block the night before, a man with his penis sliced off and shoved in his mouth. If I hadn’t read the story, I wouldn’t have even known it happened. When I did see or hear about something, I learned to shrug it off. In the book I compare life in Juárez to “The Lottery,” that Shirley Jackson short story. We knew that a few of us would be chosen for the daily killing ritual, that the odds of being chosen were very small, and that the killing was simply a cost of residence.

When did you decide to head back to the States?

There was a car bombing. Four first-responders were killed. And I happened to be right down the street when the bomb went off. It wasn’t the explosion that freaked me out so much, or that I had been so close to it. It’s that it didn’t freak me out at first, that I’d grown so accustomed to violence. I even jogged the next afternoon down the very street where the bomb exploded. But a few days after the bombing, a friend in Juárez ended up metaphorically slapping me across the face to show that I’d grown numb. And when you grow numb in Juárez, that’s when you have a problem. He convinced me that I had to leave.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book was your reexamination of Juárez’s portrayal in the media, in particular the trumped-up claims about young women being targeted by serial killers. Can you talk about why you decided to write about this? Why you didn’t just stick to soccer?

I never intended to write a book about soccer, but about Ciudad Juárez. I couldn’t seriously look at the city without looking at the dead women, which, in popular consciousness, is what Juárez is known for, above all. There’s a well-established narrative of young girls who work in the maquiladoras being snatched off the streets and murdered, supposedly just because they are women.

When I moved to the city, I believed the narrative. I had no reason to doubt it. Amnesty International is behind it, and they’ve won a Nobel Prize. All the big news outlets have publicized it. Roberto Bolaño placed the killings of the women at the center of his book “2666.” I’d watched a few films, too, both Hollywood and documentary, that showed how women are especially vulnerable in the city, and how Mexican men can’t handle the growing independence of the factory-working women in their lives. How NAFTA is to blame, too, and also, come to mention it, how serial killers and spree killers and organ harvesters and random sociopaths are equally to blame. The government cares so little about women, according to the popular narrative, that it refuses to resolve any of the “femicides,” or female murders.

But living there, I began to see that the popular narrative didn’t jibe with the world around me. Relatively few of the female murder victims are girls. Almost none of the female victims ever worked in a maquiladora. Women are being killed in the city, often in horrible ways. But many, many, many more men are being killed at the same time. Also in horrible ways. And the government doesn’t investigate these male murders, either. They don’t investigate anything! Murder really is effectively legal in Juárez. This failure of basic government, which in Juárez is sarcastically called “a weak judicial system,” has nothing to do with gender.

Proponents of the femicide [narrative], most with the best of intentions, have been extremely effective in taking the generalized violence in Juárez and turning it into something that supports their agenda. I came to call it the “femicide business.” As in any business, there are people profiting. The traditional narrative has funded their clinics and/or won them academic positions and/or book deals and/or paid speaking opportunities at conferences. Most reporting on femicide ranges from disgustingly opportunistic to depressingly sloppy. Again, so many people who write about Juárez never visit the city, or if they do they parachute in for only a day or maybe two, with their stories already plotted in advance. “Google journalism,” I call it. My time in Juárez has radicalized me against it. There needs to be more hanging out.

So it may have come as a surprise to some when Mexico’s PAN party decided to nominate Josefina Vazquez Mota, a woman, for president – the first time a woman has ever been nominated by a major Mexican party.

Accepting her nomination, Vazquez Mota, a longtime government official, said, “I will be the first woman president of Mexico in history.”

Even if they are not yet welcome in the cantina at El Mirador, women are making noticeable inroads into other areas of Mexican political life.

With the real possibility that Mexico may join Latin American countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile in electing a female to the highest office, her nomination marks a slow but steady erosion of Mexico’s macho culture, a way of life that lives on in the upper echelon of Mexican business world.

“Back in the 1950s all the cantinas in Mexico City were only for men. It’s the embedded machismo culture,” Ramon Peña-Franco, a former media analyst who worked for Mexico’s current leader Felipe Calderon.

Men gathered in cantinas to drink and play dominoes, while women stayed at home.

While the ban on women is not explicitly stated, it is enforced through the polite entreaties of waiters who explain the “tradition.” A woman in the men-only cantina might “make the other guests uncomfortable,” the Mirador manager said.

More than in the U.S. or the UK, the main stage of Mexico’s business arena continues to be dominated by men. However, more women have begun working in finance, information technology, media and manufacturing. Mexico has also seen an increasing number of female governors and cabinet members in the public sector.

And slowly, old social mores are beginning to evolve.

In 2006 many Mexican states updated the language used in marriage ceremonies, eliminating vows that asked men to treat their wives “with the magnanimity and generous benevolence that the strong should give to the weak,” and asked women to “give to her husband obedience [and] avoid awakening the most irritable and hard part of his character.”

Monica Morales, a financial analyst who was married in Mexico City in 2011, explained that the traditional language that was historically used in nuptial proceedings is too “macho.”

“Now, not even my grandmother would support it,” she said.

“Even my friends who want the most traditional weddings wouldn’t use it,” she said.

Some arenas of public life are evolving as well.

An electoral reform enacted in 2002 requires that major parties select female candidates for at least 30 percent of the seats they campaign for in the country’s congress. In 2003, the first election under the new rules, female candidates won 23 percent of the seats.

Now, women hold 30 percent of the seats in Mexico’s congress, compared to just 17 percent in the U.S.

Still, despite recent progress in the political arena, women have not yet broken through into the highest levels of Mexico’s corporate world.

Unlike in Mexico’s congress, very few seats in the country’s board rooms are filled by women. Only one of Mexico’s top 20 largest publicly traded companies has appointed a female board chair. Not one of Mexico’s largest companies has a female CEO.

When it comes to leading businesswomen in Mexico, Ramon listed “the owner of Grupo Modelo, Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala. She’s the wealthiest woman in Mexico.”

“Other than that… I don’t think I can remember,” he said.

In July, Mexicans will vote to replace Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term has been plagued by violence from a five-year war on the drug cartels.

Many voters are ready for a change.

“This is a historic nomination, it has the potential to change the dynamics of the presidential race,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert from the Council of Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York.

It is still unclear whether Vazquez Mota, who has served both as secretary of social development, and later education, can convince voters to elect her.

Vazquez Mota’s main rival in the race to Los Pinos, the president’s office, is Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The party ruled Mexico as a de facto autocracy for seven decades until it was ousted from the presidency by a candidate from the PAN in 2000, is campaigning hard as well.

Peña Nieto is currently leading in the polls, and most analysts consider him to be the favorite.

Peña Nieto, though, has faced a number of missteps so far in his campaign. At a recent event in Guadalajara, he couldn’t name three books that have influenced his life. After failing to correctly state the price of a kilo of tortillas, a staple in most families’ diets, he shrugged off criticism, saying, “I’m not the woman of the house.”

Vestiges of the macho culture, after all, are still very much present in everyday Mexico.

As the rules change, other aspects of the country’s public life have evolved with time. In 2008, for instance, Mexico City banned smoking in bars and restaurants.

The cantinas begrudgingly complied.

Seated at a table at the Mirador, Ramon said, “Machismo is rooted, so it’s been harder [to change] in Mexico than anywhere else.”

By the exit, there was a table of men in their seventies finishing a game of dominos, getting ready to leave.

“The role of women in political life is changing,” Shannon, the Mexico expert, said.

“The real challenge for women in Mexico, and elsewhere, is to increase the numbers and the breadth of their participation and say in the way things are run.”