“Yes, the music helped my identity and beyond. Through musical anecdotes Rodríguez narrates his own coming of age story, sharing some of the harsher realities of family life and social discrimination and his concert-going adventures with friends in Santa Ana, Los Angeles, and beyond. For Rodríguez, the “post” in post-punk “heralds punk’s afterlives that form a genealogy” that embraces a stylistic hybridity with regards to sound, fashion, and politics.
“A Kiss Across the Ocean,” whose title derives from Culture Club’s 1983 Long Hammersmith Odeon concert, focuses on what he defines as post-punk. “When growing up, you gravitated to what gave you a sense of empowerment and that is what music did for me and for so many other people. For a lot of us who grew up marginalized due to our sexuality, class, ethnicity, it resonates even more,” said Rodríguez. “Each one of us has a different relationship with music and the artist. Rodríguez is the author of “A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk & US Latinidad,” published by Duke University Press. The book, “ A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk & US Latinidad,” published by Duke University Press. Now Rodríguez, 51, a professor of English and media and cultural studies at UC Riverside, has taken all this historical context and placed it into a 264-page book that perfectly interlays music, life of Latinos in Southern California, and his personal memories of growing up in the 1980s. It was that same sense of displacement, of not “fitting in,” that allowed Mexican and Mexican American youth to connect with leading bands such as the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Cure and the Smiths.
Punk music in the 1970s and 80s was associated with rebels and anti-establishment attitudes both in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Other British musicians such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, and Soft Cell, among others, helped create a sense of place - and acceptance - as he explored his own identity and his Mexican American culture in the 1980s. The androgynous figure dressed in flamboyant attire immediately drew the attention of a then teen Rodríguez. The first time Rodríguez saw Boy George in a televised music video, he was in awe.
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