Critical Writing Index

Monopolies and Maquiladoras: The Resistant Re-encoding of Gaming in Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez’s Turista Fronterizo

by Claire Taylor

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Dec. 2012, v. 18, no. 2, pp. 151-165

This article focuses on the collaborative game-art work, Turista Fronterizo (2005), by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez. It starts by analyzing how this game closely

engages with the border as material locality and as representative of particular (corporate) practices. It focuses on the maquiladora, arguing that it functions as the central trope encoding the work, a synecdoche for post-Fordist late capitalism. The article examines how Turista Fronterizo’s playing with both digital and pre-digital conceptualizations of recombinatory praxis is undertaken as a form of questioning of the status quo, encouraging the user to establish and critique the interconnections between the various locations visited. It analyzes how socio-economic inequalities of the border are encoded in the structural inequalities of the ludology, and argues that Turista Fronterizo critiques the structural inequities of the border economy.

ITEM 2012.044 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Turista FronterizoCoco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez

Two Undiscovered Americans Visit the WestCoco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña

A Room of One’s OwnCoco Fusco

Operation AntropoCoco Fusco

Transborder Immigrant ToolRicardo Dominguez