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Ready, Player Juan utilizes an interdisciplinary approach centering Latinx studies in conversation with video game, gender, film, and performance studies to analyze themes of borders, whiteness, and criminality. I combine US Latinx cultural and media studies with lived experience to conduct close readings of how developers include Latinxs. Instead of characters who generate identificatory connections with the player via complex narrative, Latinxs manifest through an amalgam of stereotypes I call Player Juan. Latinxs appear as mostly non-player characters (NPCs) whose identities are based in discourse accepted as “truths” by AAA game developers who are mostly white men (≈ 85%). Player Juan takes inspiration from Shira Chess’ Ready, Player Two which argues how male developers include women not based on lived experiences, but on perceptions about their play which creates the designed identity Player Two. Thus, my term equates to a framework challenging how AAA games include Latinxs through stereotypes and discourse. I begin recounting personal connections to video games, Loteria (Mexican Bingo), and storytelling to examine cultural lessons in games. The introduction engages Christopher González’s Permissible Narratives and how audience expectations dictate what is and is not permissible for Latinxs telling their stories through literature. The idea of permissibility weaves throughout this study as game developers continue to limit the permissibility of non-White identities, especially Latinx identities. I posit video games are borders through an examination of stereotypes in popular game titles, such as Tomb Raider: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Last of Us 2. As an example, I theorize “crossing” to argue how players cross into games and how players can cross with or through characters they play or interact with. For example, players cross through Latinx characters and cultures in the introductions to Tomb Raider and Uncharted 4 as Latinidad is only included as a tutorial space to overcome. I conduct a transmedial analysis of Miles Morales’ presence in two games by Insomniac studios and the film Into the Spider-Verse. I argue not just anyone can wear the mask because of the Peter-Spidey binary which always affirms Peter Parker as Spider-Man and vice versa. In addition, I argue Miles’s story is not permissible without proximity to Parker’s whiteness. By examining the suturing of players to characters through the player-character fusion and through deploying Latinx theories, I interrogate the ways players interact with developers’ decisions when it comes to representing Latinx masculinities. I probe how players navigate Life is Strange 2’s narrative as Sean Diaz. For example, I argue how players cross into games inhabiting a liminal 3rd space where lived experience/knowledge collide with developers’ worldviews. I call this space digital mestizaje, which aims to document the perspectival shifts that occur when cultures collide via play, challenging players, scholars, and developers to introspect on the ways they inhabit video games’ borderlands.