What is it about?
Turista Fronterizo (2005) is a collaborative game-art work, by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Domínguez. This article analyzes how this game represents the US-Mexico border as material locality, and as representative of particular (corporate) practices. The article focuses on the maquiladora or assembly plant, arguing that it is central to the work, and stands for post-Fordist late capitalism. The article looks at how socio-economic inequalities of the border are encoded in the game, and argues that Turista Fronterizo critiques the structural inequities of the border economy
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Why is it important?
This article is important in that it analyzes how games and game art are not just for fun, but can be used to generate serious reflection on contemporary socio-political concerns. It gives insights into how artists working on/with the US-Mexico border comment on and critique the border economy, and living conditions on the border, through their works.
Perspectives
This article was one of my first published pieces on game art. I really enjoyed Turista Fronterizo, and it has since become one of the case studies we look at in my final year module, where students learn about new media in Latin America. This piece also fed into my recent book, Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture.
Professor Claire L Taylor
University of Liverpool
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Monopolies andMaquiladoras: The Resistant Re-encoding of Gaming in Coco Fusco and Ricardo Domínguez'sTurista Fronterizo, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, December 2012, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13260219.2012.740826.
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