What Makes Latinx Game Studies
Sombra. Courtesy of Blizzard.
There is something spectacular blossoming in academia. At the intersection of games, Latinidad, and queerness, Latinx Game Studies (LGS) is coalescing as an important subfield of Critical Game Studies. Critical Game Studies not only challenges violent systems that oppress marginalized people within the medium of games and play but also expands our understanding of what games and play are, allowing us to work toward just futures and diverse ways of being in the world. LGS takes up the task of Critical Game Studies and prioritizes the specialized focus on the relationship between play, games, and Latinidad.
Latinx is a complex term. My experience as a Latinx person living in Dallas is vastly different from a Latinx person living in New York City. Therefore, identifying as Latinx is a personal and political process. People find unity with the term and others confront its exclusionary history. But we can apply the way we understand Latinx as convoluted and chaotic to how we understand play. From playing video games to playing board games with friends and family, “play” is a politically charged term that potentially liberates or constricts our imaginations and futures. Therefore, play reveals intimate investments toward how we identify, relate to others, and progress.
“The formation of the nascent field already privileges the perspectives of straight Latino scholarship and experiences. ”
However, as Latinx Game Studies explores the relationship between games, play, and Latinidad, I am beginning to feel a sort of uncomfortable, familiar feeling. I am worried about where the field is going and who it is leaving behind, so I am approaching these critiques with the utmost love and care. The formation of the nascent field already privileges the perspectives of straight Latino scholarship and experiences. There is an uncritical application of studying “Latinidad" that erases the harms certain groups face, such as Afro-Latinx and Indigenous communities, further complicated by the fact that every single game uniquely constructs Latinidad that we must specifically unpack. What is more, feminist and queer Latinx frameworks remain on the periphery of Latinx Game Studies, vaguely gestured as something that will come at some unknown date.
But I want them now. I want LGS to center queerness and Latinidad from the onset. Perhaps imperfectly, perhaps too immediate, but definitely queer, I seek to address early gaps in the formation of Latinx Game Studies that fellow scholars, creatives, and players can build off, destabilizing both Latinx and play. A Latinx Game Studies framework troubles all aspects of itself together; it not only disrupts Latinx as a whole category but the way Latinx materializes through play in each game. LGS understands both Latinx and play as ambivalent spaces with radical potential while attending to and challenging the systems of oppression brought by Western hegemonies, such as the United States but also Latin America. It confronts how there is not much Latinx representation in video games and when there is, it teaches us to intervene.
For example, the character of Sombra from the popular shooting game Overwatch replays many Latinx stereotypes. (Another criminal? C’mon people.) But at the same time, she empowers many Latinx and queer players who relate to her character. Though it is important to point out how there is little Latinx representation throughout video games, particularly queer Latinx, scholars and players must work against the misrepresentations that flatten us into one hegemonic group. Identifying violence that stems from machismo, queerphobia, and racism endemic to Latinx communities is necessary, but relying on stereotypes of Latinx masculinities to dismiss this behavior only strengthens the inequalities that machismo, racism, and queerphobia prop up.
Raze. Courtesy of Riot Games.
Latinx Game Studies tackles societal ills, such as anti-Blackness. Sombra is one example. Colombian actress Carolina Ravassa is the voice behind the character of Sombra who is Mexican. This would otherwise be a minor point but Ravassa also provides voice acting for the Afro-Latina character of Raze in the gameValorant. No shade to Ravassa, but do video games truly think Latinas from Mexico to Colombia to Brazil sound the same? It is disappointing that Raze, who is a Black Brazilian, does not have a voice actor from Brazil, especially when the game is incredibly diverse. Latinx Game Studies not only addresses these disparities of representation but also understands on a larger scale that video games are constructing how other people are coming to understand Latinidad. Thus, Latinx Game Studies must begin with—and continue to focus on—its queer, messy, specific, and self-reflective roots.
“All play is a form of borderlands, where we can understand games and play as a third space, a place that weaves in different cultures. ”
All play is a form of borderlands, where we can understand games and play as a third space, a place that weaves in different cultures. It may come as a surprise that Overwatch is popular with various marginalized communities from queer Latinx players to feminist players, but the mainstream gaming community does not give enough attention to them, which overlooks how many people partake in gaming culture. Thus I use the word “borderland” because it perfectly represents how queer identities navigate games, and I would be remiss to not include how many marginalized groups are colliding with the dominant white male gamer, similar to how groups deal with oppressive systems within the borderlands. But what is important is how many queer Latinx players are using play to find community and these playable borderlands have so much culture that goes unnoticed.
As game studies scholar Bo Ruburg writes in Video Games Have Always Been Queer, “Video games have always been queer. . . Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play.” Additionally, in Ready Player Juan: Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games, LGS scholar Carlos González conceptualizes all games as borders, taking into account how various cultures transverse through and beyond games. Both scholars are providing ways that expand play as spaces that resonate with queer and Latinx experiences. What I seek to do is link the way play and games have so much potential for queer Latinx communities to express their way of being that factors in their queer and Latinx experience.
Many Latinx Game Studies scholars are establishing how play and Latinx communities deeply resonate with each other. Latinx Game Studies would not exist as it is without the work of scholar Aaron Trammell, whose idea of reparative play is a key inspiration. This approach, as he details in Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology, “...gives life to a form of play that attends to the traumatic aspects of play and serves as a form of reparations. After almost a century of colonizing play that centers a White European perspective, we must totally rethink the premises upon which this theory is predicated.” Similar to the way Latinx scholars unpacked how whiteness is central to the history of Latinidad, Trammell confronts how whiteness is central to play. The theories of play go deep. Many previous European scholars have constructed the term to be so narrow that it does not take into account non-white experiences. But scholars like Trammell focus on the relationship between play and Blackness, an area that Latinx Studies as a whole must incorporate. Latinx Game Studies is no exception.
Venture. Courtesy of Blizzard.
Baptise. Courtesy of Blizzard.
Together, those three elements—queerness, negotiating ambivalent borderlands, and applying a reparative play approach—let us take seriously the pain and pleasure generated from the Latinx representations in games and play. For example, I play Overwatch, probably too much. The multiplayer, first-person shooter game offers a diverse set of characters, many of whom are Latinx like Sombra, Venture, Reaper, Baptiste, Lúcio, and Illari. A few of these characters tap into familiar stereotypes like soccer being central to Lúcio and Reaper being a machista criminal; meanwhile, others represent pan-ethnic Latinidades that don't reflect our realities. Latinx Game Studies confronts stereotypes that are pervasive in video games while providing space for people from those communities to provide nuance and alternate empowering readings because we should not abandon these characters entirely.
Take Sombra, for example. She is a criminal from Mexico. But while many acknowledge the harm her character brings forth, Latinx gamers also identify with her. That’s because Sombra is much more than her negative representation. Latinx players find her character to be subversive and empowering. In a world that is violent, she is suave. It is a thread of research I want to continue in the future and invite fellow scholars to consider the queer possibilities of her and other complex characters while working through systems that uphold whiteness in both the United States and Latinx cultures.
Latinx Game Studies centers queer feminist Latinidad experiences and practices where the possibility of queer utopias are possible. From my perspective, we can swiftly realize the link between utopian queer worlds and borderlands through a Latinx Game Studies paradigm inspired by José Muñoz’s work of disidentification. As Muñoz explains, this is the process of decoding culture from the perspective of a minority subject who understands that systems of oppression have disempowered them. This is necessary to understand play and games. To envision a queer future, Muñoz writes that “disidentifactory performance and readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility. Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, we nonetheless need to hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a queer world.”
While I want Latinx Game Studies to mirror who we are, there are potential pitfalls for the field such as relying on identity essentialism, calling for “authentic” representation that can do more harm than good, and regulating queer feminist Latinx to the sidelines. For example, in González’s Ready Player Juan, he uses “digital mestizaje,” a term that concerns me. He states that “digital mestizaje can consider anything digital (involving visual consumption via digital means) as creating cultural mixtures that lead to tensions between constructive/productive and destructive/reductive.” While invoking Gloria Anzaldúa, whose texts resonate within a Latinx Game Studies framework of providing the foundational language of borderlands where games and play can be understood as a third cultural space where new cultures can be seen, the word “mestizaje” has a troubling history that often excludes Blackness and Indigeneity.
As Juana María Rodríguez writes in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, “Often both popular and official projects of mulatismo and mestizaje have been used to flatten or subsume differences, reinscribe margins, and uphold whiteness. As with national identity, these cultural identities are very often grounded in hetero-masculinist narratives and highly stratified categories of racialized gender.” In Latinx Studies, and more so Mexican American Studies, a field that I was brought up in early in my academic career, the terms we deploy to rally the many communities that fall under the curious term “Latinx” are political. With a loaded history and from the perspective of someone who would perhaps benefit from the term, I worry the application of digital mestizaje would narrow solidarity across people and unify and again reinscribe violent whiteness, a system and practice that many Latinx communities propagate at the expense of others.
“To draft the dimensions of Latinx Game Studies, we must prevent replaying old stories that lead to exclusion, particularly for Black, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous peoples.”
To draft the dimensions of Latinx Game Studies, we must prevent replaying old stories that lead to exclusion, particularly for Black, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. Each iteration of Latinidad within a game is unique, though clearly remade from our world. This makes the work of “unifying” (whatever that means) Latinidad daunting, but we can accomplish it through critical coalitions that understand these differences.
While there will be a future in-depth framing of Latinx Game Studies buffered with academic jargon, it’s good that it is currently incomplete. In the undone state remains hope, the potential for a Latinx Game Studies field that honors its commitment toward queer feminist Latinx scholarship and experiences. Rather than manifest a queerness that comes toward the end of the field's journey, let’s start with a Latinx Game Studies paradigm that centers queer Latinx experiences and communities. I do not wish for Latinx Game Studies to slowly approach queerness as an extra chapter. Rather, I want the communities not often talked about in Latinx issues, such as queer, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous communities, in the foreground of Latinx Game Studies. Being a queer Latinx gamer, I am used to the erasure of my identities and communities within Latinx and gamer culture. But through Latinx Game Studies, you can’t explore the politics that construct Latinidad, games, and play without bringing many of these communities into the spotlight.