[Regina Mills is an incoming Associate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her first book, Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, was published in 2024 from the University of Texas Press. Her work blends literary and cultural studies, refugee studies, critical game studies, and much more. I’m excited to be working with her through the Scholars Strategy Network and encourage everyone to check out her work!]
Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month has just come to an end, so I have been thinking a lot about Latina representation in video games. Many people think video games is a hobby for white young men, and even though the data does not bear that out, it influences the kind of games that do and don’t get made today. I was lucky to spend time at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY last year. I went there to study the Brøderbund Collection, particularly the history of Carmen Sandiego. So to celebrate the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, I’m going to provide a little history of Carmen Sandiego
Players first met Carmen Sandiego 40 years ago in the 1985 game, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? The game came with a copy of the World Almanac and was part of the educational games division of Brøderbund, a software company before such companies became specialized as game companies. Back in the 1970s and 80s, software companies would have many different divisions, such as productivity and word processing software, educational software, and entertainment. In looking at the spreadsheets of Brøderbund’s earnings in 1985 and 1986, Carmen Sandiego wasn’t a quick seller, but within 6 months, the game was earning big. School teachers, tasked with teaching students how to use informational sources like encyclopedias and almanacs (before these became digital), loved how Where in the World gave students a concrete and even fun way to learn about world flags, a country’s common exports, and important world cities. The Carmen seriescame with a free copy of the latest almanac and students had to use the almanac to interpret the clues left behind and make choices about where to search next. The game had a time mechanic, so any action you took cut into the limited time you had to find the culprit, so your choices mattered.
Carmen Sandiego was the final bad guy. You had to track down her accomplices, picking up the breadcrumbs which finally led you to Carmen herself, the head of VILE (Villains International League of Evil). Carmen Sandiego’s character, in a bright red trench coat, with red hair and a hat covering most of her face gives her an air of mystery. At The Strong, I learned that the original Carmen was a he – a male villain named Estaban Devious (of Andorra, a small independent region near Spain). While the Carmen Sandiego series never made her background clear, the name appeared to be Spanish (based on San Diego the place, rather than a common Spanish surname). The game creator likely didn’t think much about Carmen’s background – her name was meant to match her mysterious image on the game case. After the fact, when some worried about Carmen being a bad role model for young Latina girls, the creators claimed that her surname was from a previous marriage and that she wasn’t Spanish or Latina at all.
Despite the fact that the Carmen Sandiego has been a consistent presence, with the games, the popular game show, and multiple animated shows, Carmen’s background generally remained a mystery. Gina Rodriguez rebooted Carmen through the 2019-21 Netflix series (and a 2025 video game) and focused on reclaiming Carmen as a Latina figure. The animation style changed her to look darker-skinned and much younger. Rather than a mature, sophisticated, light-skin/white-passing villain, the rebooted version makes Carmen into a Latina girl caught between worlds. Her parents were murdered, and she was raised at VILE headquarters, trained from a young age to be a master thief. When she rebels against this, she uses the knowledge she gained from VILE to sabotage them, but ACME detectives don’t know if she is a good guy or a bad guy.
In this reboot, the writers show deep respect for Carmen’s character. Like many Latina/o/x video game characters, she acts as a mirror for society. In Carmen, players have been able to project what they want to see, whether it’s a young Latina seeing herself in an industry that rarely includes Latina/o characters at all, or an authority figure (like a parent or teacher) that see Hispanic children as constantly at-risk, criminals in the making. The new version of Carmen wants to find herself, but she must contend with how authority figures and her parental surrogates have tried to define her, without much access to the story of her origins. As a Guatemalan American, I personally connect to the fact that Carmen struggles to lay claim to her Argentinian roots, since she was taken from there so young and because there is a lot of silence about her past (something that many immigrant children can relate to).
Latina representation in video games is disappointingly low. Latino male video game characters are somewhat easier to find, whether it’s in Life Is Strange 2, the Gears of War series, El Hijo: A Wild West Tale, or the Afro-Puerto Rican media sensation Miles Morales in the Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise.While I, and many others, am excited for the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 6 to be Latina for the first time, most Latina characters in games appear in fighting games or as nameless background characters or villains. Or they are in games that don’t’ center narrative, like the racing game Need for Speed: Heat (which has several Latino main characters in its campaign story). Many fear that the current backlash against diverse representation and anti-immigrant attitudes will hurt what little progress has been made, but I imagine that Latina representation will find a way to happen, even if it’s not through major gaming companies.
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