Review: A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad, by Richard T. Rodríguez

A viral scene from the Netflix series, Wednesday, shows Jenna Ortega's titular daughter of Gomez and Morticia Addams busting out in a creepy-kooky dance at a school event.Ortega, a Latina actor in her early twenties from the Coachella Valley in Southern California, first thanked 1980s-era UK post-punk singer and icon Siouxsie Sioux among others on social media for the "help" and inspiration for her wacky self-choreographed solo performance.In Hulu's This Fool, 30-year-old Maggie, a Latina from South L.A., wears a red streak in her black hair and a Siouxsie Sioux graphic T-shirt that emphasizes the singer's famous eye makeup.Maggie's boyfriend, Julio, hates when people in the neighborhood assume he's a Morrissey fan because he wears a "gentlemen's haircut" that mimics the pompadour and fade popular with the ex-Smiths singer from Manchester and his many Latino fans.These recent pop culture moments demonstrate not only the ubiquity of certain UK musical acts in US Latina/o/x culture but also the ongoing traffic in touch between those groups that transcends time, space, generation, and geography-a touch rooted in a shared sense of recognition between members of marginalized communities.University of California Riverside professor Richard T. Rodrı ´guez theorizes this intergenerational, subcultural "touch" in A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad.The book explores the mutually informative relationships between US Latina/o/x fans of British post-punk bands from the 1980s onward.Rodrı ´guez "documents the allure of US Latinidad for British post-punk artists to underscore the interplay of reciprocal intimacy" that plays out in multiple and often contradictory ways through music's touch (9).Rodriguez, however, does more than more than simply tally the seemingly one-directional phenomenon of Latina/o/x fandom of UK post-punk artists like Siouxsie Sioux, Morrissey, and others.Rather, he illustrates the kaleidoscopic ways in which the "kiss across the ocean" is shared by parties, an act of mutual bonding and intimacy that represents the transatlantic "multidirectional influences" and cultural impacts of US Latinidad on many UK post-punk singers, bands, and musical groups.Rodrı ´guez takes the book's title from a 1983 Culture Club concert film of the same name that aired in the United States on HBO.The London-based band and its genderbending singer Boy George captivated twelve-year-old Rodrı ´guez when he first