Written for all gaming enthusiasts, this book fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities.

Carlos Gabriel Kelly González is a postdoctoral fellow in Latinx studies at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University and the author of the poetry collection Wounds Fragments Derelict.

“Carlos Gabriel Kelly González has written a book that is fascinating, readable, nuanced, and thought-provoking. He gives voice to the experience of Latinx gamers while offering a cutting critical analysis of the video game industry’s shortcomings when it comes to representing Latinx masculinity and identity. Ready Player Juan is not just a page-turner, it is a major contribution to scholarship on games, culture, and identity.”—Phillip Penix-Tadsen, author of Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America

“This book offers a lovely, balanced account of the structures, experiences, realities, and other narratives that inform Latinx gaming. Those of us working in this domain recognize this book is propelling forward conversations around gender, race/ethnicity, decoloniality, media studies, game studies, cultural studies, and so many others. This author is an innovative thinker who is on track record of breaking new, important ground.”—Kishonna L. Gray, author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming— -