In A Kiss across the Ocean Richard T. Rodriguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodriguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. He recounts these bands' importance for him and other Latinx kids and discusses their frequent identification with these bands' glamorous performance of difference. Whether it was Siouxsie Sioux drawing inspiration from Latinx contemporaries and cultural practices or how Soft Cell singer Marc Almond's lyrics were attuned to the vibrancy of queer Latinidad, Rodriguez shows how Latinx culture helped shape British post-punk. He traces the fandom networks that link these groups across space and time to illuminate how popular music establishes and facilitates intimate relations across the Atlantic. In so doing, he demonstrates how the music and styles that have come to define the 1980s hold significant sway over younger generations equally enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations.

In A Kiss across the Ocean Richard T. Rodriguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodriguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. He recounts these bands' importance for him and other Latinx kids and discusses their frequent identification with these bands' glamorous performance of difference. Whether it was Siouxsie Sioux drawing inspiration from Latinx contemporaries and cultural practices or how Soft Cell singer Marc Almond's lyrics were attuned to the vibrancy of queer Latinidad, Rodriguez shows how Latinx culture helped shape British post-punk. He traces the fandom networks that link these groups across space and time to illuminate how popular music establishes and facilitates intimate relations across the Atlantic. In so doing, he demonstrates how the music and styles that have come to define the 1980s hold significant sway over younger generations equally enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations.

As both an idea and an institution, the family has been at the heart of Chicano/a cultural politics since the Mexican American civil rights movement emerged in the late 1960s. In "Next of Kin," Richard T. Rodriguez explores the competing notions of "la familia" found in movement-inspired literature, film, video, music, painting, and other forms of cultural expression created by Chicano men. Drawing on cultural studies and feminist and queer theory, he examines representations of the family that reflect and support a patriarchal, heteronormative nationalism as well as those that reconfigure kinship to encompass alternative forms of belonging.

Describing how "la familia" came to be adopted as an organizing strategy for communitarian politics, Rodriguez looks at foundational texts including Rodolfo Gonzales's well-known poem "I Am Joaquin," the Chicano Liberation Youth Conference's manifesto "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan," and Jose Armas's "La Familia de La Raza." Rodriguez analyzes representations of the family in the films "I Am Joaquin," "Yo Soy Chicano," and "Chicana"; the Los Angeles public affairs television series "Ahora "; the experimental videos of the artist-activist Harry Gamboa Jr.; and the work of hip-hop artists such as Kid Frost and Chicano Brotherhood. He reflects on homophobia in Chicano nationalist thought, and examines how Chicano gay men have responded to it in works including Al Lujan's video "S&M in the Hood," the paintings of Eugene Rodriguez, and a poem by the late activist Rodrigo Reyes. "Next of Kin" is both a wide-ranging assessment of "la familia"'s symbolic power and a hopeful call for a more inclusive cultural politics.