General History of African Americans

African Americans are the citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. However, the term refers to a racial group, most often to the people whose ancestors have experienced slavery in the United States. The genesis of African Americans was the result of forced detention and transport of Africans from their homeland across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1400s, European traders plundered the west coast of Africa for slaves. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British became active players in the theft and the sale of African human beings for profit. Africans were brought to the United States against their will to work on the plantations owned by the white in the South. The permanent settlement of Africans and the regular slave trade between Africa and the English North American colonies began in 1619. Therefore, the history of black slavery emerged in 1619, when a Dutch man brought twenty Africans in America, and sold them at Jamestown in Virginia.

The first shipload of colonists to Charleston in 1670 brought three enslaved Africans with them and the next year, Sir John Yeamans, an English colonial administrator and planter who served as Governor of Carolina from 1672 to 1674, brought more Africans to South Carolina. Over one lakh Africans were being brought in America each year. Merchant shippers from New York and New England imported Africans as usual commodities for the planters of Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. Both laws and customs defined all Africans in the colonies as slaves by 1670. The enslaved Africans were gradually employed on the growing rice plantations in South Carolina from the 1690s, because numerous slaves were required to cultivate the plantations. From 1619 to 1700, the African in colonial North America increased from sixty to almost twenty-eight thousand.

During more than three centuries of the slavery era, an estimated fifteen million Africans were captured and shipped to the New World where they were sold into slavery. The majority of slaves went to the plantations in the Caribbean and South America. During 1700–1750, thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to the American colonies each year. By 1776, the colonies had a slave population of more than five lacks. The majority of these enslaved Africans lived in the south of Maryland.

Two Questions

During the time that I worked on this book, two questions occasionally cropped up when I spoke to friends and colleagues about what I was writing. The first question was beguilingly simple while the second was rather more challenging. These were also questions I had addressed to myself periodically as I moved on to fresh ideas in the development of my position on Hitchcock's work. I don't believe that I ultimately arrived at satisfactory answers in every instance, but in the effort to appease my interlocutors I travelled part of the way toward eliminating most of my self-doubt. So, I will start with these questions – and with my attempts to answer them – to draw a frame around the text that follows.

The first question, which I initially took to be simple, asked what the book was going to be about. More specifically, people wanted to ask me about my method. How did I plan to approach Hitchcock? Was the book going to be an original series of analyses of Hitchcock's films, analyses that until now no one had attempted? And if so, which of Hitchcock's films would I be examining? Was I writing about Alfred Hitchcock with the plan of rescuing a filmmaker from the void of forgetfulness into which popular icons are sometimes swallowed up? Was the book to be a fresh take on Hitchcock's already well-covered biography in consequence of recently unearthed material that showed him to be quite different from traditional accounts of his life?

Questions concerning my approach did not stop there, for I was also asked if my book was to be an account of Hitchcock's role in the history of cinema, the enduring influence of his work on contemporary filmmakers, or possibly a demonstration of the latest film studies trend – I don't think that a particular trend was ever specified – in the task of explicating the master's works. One colleague wanted to know if I was writing a book that used some new psychological theory to make sense of Hitchcock's infamously enigmatic personality, while another asked if I would be arguing against the conventional interpretation of Hitchcock as an important and inspirational figure in cinema.

Acknowledgments: Data analysis and quality assurance of data provided by Research Assistants Catherine Cummings, Gregory Johnson, Danielle Oates, Vincent Rivers, Trinity Russo, Caroline Ward, Jordan Windham

What Are Ecosystem Services?

Just after my fifth birthday, my father took me fishing for the first time. He set my tiny Mickey Mouse fishing rod on the dock and did his best to explain to me the fundamentals of freshwater fishing. Hooks, bobbers and bait were the subjects at hand. It seemed very complicated, but I eagerly nodded my head as though I understood the lessons he was teaching me. I was certainly more interested in the excitement of pulling a live fish from the depths than learning the techniques needed to accomplish this feat.

He showed me how to carefully put a worm on the hook, and I was ready to go. I dropped the line in the water and expected a quick bite. Nothing. The minutes crept by, and it seemed the fish had much less interest than I did. My attention span waned as I sat waiting for something to bite. I began to look around. I heard the water lapping against the dock. The birds calling to one another from the shrubs and trees lining the pond. I smelled the warm Alabama breeze and admired the clouds lazily drifting overhead. There was so much happening, and yet nothing was happening all at once. As the morning turned to afternoon, it was obvious that the fish were not interested in our bait, and we left the pond without catching a thing.

While it's true that we weren't able to get a fish, all was not lost. Something else had stirred in my young mind. For the first time in my life, I felt connected to something more. I was only a tiny piece of something greater, something far more connected than I could comprehend at the time. Even though we didn't catch anything, I wanted more. I found value in the connectedness and the beauty of the Alabama ecosystem. I felt like a fisherman. I will always fondly remember this morning on the dock with my father as the first time I truly felt like I had an identity beyond that of a child.

The dramatic movement of African American women is a consciousness of victimization that one is oppressed, because one is African American, female, and poor. Through their plays, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks have revealed the social, economic, political, cultural, and educational oppression of African Americans in general and especially the African American women in the racist white society. They have defined and captured the African, African American, and especially African American women's experiences in their dramas. They have highlighted their existential troubles to reveal African and African American life, history, and culture. These dramatists have demolished the distortions which were in existence pertaining to their history, culture, civilization, and the life style in general and African American women in particular. They have launched a protest against racism, sexism, and classism.

The images of African American women in the plays written by African American men are generally different from the images of African American women in the plays by African American women. In her essay, “Images of Black Women in the Plays by Black Playwrights,” Jeanne Marie A. Miller states that:

Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks wrote about the same subject that of the African American male playwrights, but they differed in terms of perceptions. The central characters in their plays are generally female. These women are often found in key roles. In many plays, the husband is dead, or deficient in the family unit. The action for some of the parts takes place in a domestic situation. However, the effects of racism resonate in the house. They offered a multiplicity of options through African American characters that came from the heart of African American community.

Alice Childress dwells on the triple jeopardy and subjugation of African American women due to racism, classism, and also by the white and African American patriarchal social order. She uses a dramatic technique known as iconographic approach of representation which highlights the problems of ethnic identity. The icon functions as objects related to other objects on the stage. Photographs, masks, signs, and paintings also function as related elements, representing the blackness on the stage.

Taking a page from his predecessor, retired army officer Ollanta Humala Tasso reinvented himself during the 2011 presidential campaign. In 2006, he was a fiery populist, donning red shirts, boasting plans to establish state control over natural resources, criticizing US policies, and touting support from Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Five years later, Humala had become a moderate, pro-business social democrat who often wore a business suit. Moreover, Nadine Heredia Alarcón de Humala, the candidate's charming and photogenic wife, was never far from his side—or from the cameras. Brazilian political consultants were central to Humala's transformation from a radical politician into a socially moderate one, attractive to a broader political base and international markets (Aramayo and Pereira 2011; St John 2016, 153). Humala won the first round with 31.7 percent of the vote followed by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, who polled 23.6 percent. In the second round, Humala was elected with 51.54 percent of the vote (Lupu 2012).

Three factors helped to explain Humala's surprising victory. First, the collapse of political parties in Peru led to a fragmented political environment. Ten candidates ran for president in 2011 but only five were truly competitive. Three establishment candidates together won 44 percent of the vote, but none of them won enough votes to move to the second round, opening the door to anti-establishment candidates to advance. Second, despite the economic boom under García, public discontent and distrust of the political system was high due to a weak state and weak democratic institutions. Concerned about crime and corruption, the electorate voted for change. Third, Humala's moderate turn during the campaign, masterminded by Brazilian advisers, helped him win over middle class voters. Fujimori, on the other hand, was unable to distance herself from the authoritarian government of her imprisoned father (McClintock and Vallas 2011).

In most important areas, the foreign policy of the Humala administration closely resembled the foreign policies of the Toledo and García governments. In an interview, Foreign Minister Rafael Roncagliolo Orbegoso rightly emphasized that “the foreign policy of states is based on national interest” and “there exist permanent interests and those that reflect international circumstances.” At the same time, he argued there was an important qualitative difference in the foreign policy of the Humala administration, noting its emphasis on investment, regional infrastructure, and educational and cultural exchange.

Methods

Case selection and research design

The proposed New Cruise Berthing Facility project in the Cayman Islands was selected as the case study for this research. This port infrastructure project was selected because, in the years following its announcement in 2013, an environmental dispute between two coalitions (over the potential economic benefits versus environmental impact) arose and continues to this day. Both coalitions ran sophisticated campaigns that pushed their policy beliefs to persuade the public and government to proceed with or cancel the project. The project's threat to adjacent coral reefs and an unprecedented outcome of an indefinite halt of the project, mobilized by the non-dominant coalition, make this case of special interest.

This research uses a critical case-study research design to gain in-depth and contextual insights into a complex and contemporary issue (Yin, 2018). This case qualifies as a critical case because understanding how coalitions are formed to contest infrastructure projects that threaten coral reefs is important for future environmental disputes and is not limited to coral reef conservation. A qualitative approach to content analysis is used, wherein the researchers collect document data from local newspapers to identify coalition properties and the occurrences of policy change and learning. The Advocacy Coalition Framework is used with deductive logic to thematically code and analyze data (Saldaña, 2016).

Data collection

A total of 420 news articles were collected as the data for this book. Articles were collected from two local newspapers: The Cayman News Service and the Cayman Compass. Newspaper sources were chosen because the port project overtook national headlines for seven years with stories running almost daily for weeks at a time between 2018 and 2019. The Cayman News Service and The Cayman Compass were chosen because they are the two prominent online local newspapers in the Cayman Islands. While many articles were neutral, the Cayman News Service emphasized the views of and expressed support for the anti-port coalition, while the Cayman Compass (to a lesser extent) supported the pro-port coalition. The earliest article was dated on June 8, 2015 and the latest on September 9, 2021. n = 308 articles exist under the tag “cruise dock facility” in the Cayman News Service, of which n = 283 were included.

“Does the associative curve of human figures (different from that of animal figures and diminishing at regular intervals) mean anything and if so, what? To expand the topic, it has seemed essential to approach the foundation of the problem and question the nature of what pre-historians label, as a whole, the ‘anthropomorphs,’ a vestigial term from a time when we still asked questions about their possible humanity.

After reviewing the topic, we have around 75 parietal figures and about as many mobiliary figures with the exception of genital figures, which will be considered together with signs: In fact, each morphological transition from vulva to triangle or oval render the distinction rather precarious.

Figurative states. Research into morphological characteristics produces an initial appreciation of the figurative level of works spanning from pure geometric to figurative geometric, figurative synthetic and figurative analytic.

It is possible to apply figurative states to representations of humans but it is difficult to describe them in detail given the small number of witnesses. Pure geometric does not contain any figures whose characteristics of human representation can be established by any procedure, so we are limited to admitting this shortcoming. One exception may be the small figurines from Mezine whose genital contours are still identifiable as those of feminine figures, whereas the decoration around them is purely geometric.

There are hardly any better examples of the figurative geometric. The man at Lascaux is the most convincing. Note that, located at the base of the ‘shaft’ between the rhinoceros and the bison that has attacked it, the ‘wiry’ man is, in terms of his figurative state, at least one degree above his two partners. The figurative synthetic is, however, the ordinary state of numerous parietal and mobiliary figures. At this level, the curves have an overall and simplifying modulation but, while animal attributes are always rendered to a sufficient degree to ensure identification, a fair number of the human figures are ambiguous (a solitary head, phantomatic contours…).

The figurative analytic is primarily attested in sculpture. It involves a detailed analysis of anatomical curves, even if the assembly of these curves leads to unusual volumes. The statuettes of Kostenki and Lespugue provide the possible extremes of a curve analysis.

The previous chapter detailed how ghost narratives are inherently intertwined with discourses surrounding the soul's immortality. Ghosts represent a form of ‘disembodied’ immortality understood in relation to the broadly Christian concept of human ‘mortal immortality’, in which ‘the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life’ (Romans 6:23), meaning both bodily death and soul immortality are integral to the human experience. In the form of immortal wanderers, created immortal creatures, vampires and successful alchemists, we find an early Gothic obsession with another form of mortal immortality: embodied immortality. These accounts feature supernatural figures understood to be real within the fictional world of the text, but with no suggestion of their extra-fictional reality. These ‘mortal immortals’ rely for their meaning on (or are used to critique) an underlying theological framework invested in a Christian conception of a body/soul distinction.

The dynamics of the inter-relation of body and soul were the focus of debate throughout the eighteenth century. A Hobbesian materialist denial of the difference between body and soul was taken up in different ways by atheist and deist thinkers, sceptics and Socinian Unitarians like Joseph Priestley. The popular conception of the human condition, however, continued to emphasise the distinction between body and soul. While opinions differed as to the mechanics of their interaction, this concept of body/soul relations was rooted doctrinally in the connected but not synonymous differentiation between flesh and spirit. It is worth delineating this distinction to fully understand the theological undercurrents connected to embodied mortalimmortal figures. I will not be tracing one specific theological denomination’s view but rather looking at a broad overview of these distinctions as they are frequently found in contemporary Anglican and much Dissenting thought, along Calvinist, Lutheran and Arminian lines.

The spirit and the flesh are imagined as two antagonistic and ultimately incompatible elements: ‘The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and they are contrary the one to the other.

Theoretical Framework

To best conceptualize the importance of cultural ecosystem services, and the values they hold for the people who rely on these ecosystems, we must clearly define some of the key terms outlined in our theoretical framework, derived from Fish et al., 2016. In this framework the fundamental building block for understanding how cultural ecosystem services and the benefits they provide work in tandem. It begins with the biophysical domain in which humans interact with their environment. The biophysical domain is defined as nature's condition and ecological functioning (independent of interactions with people/benefits/services). Stated simply, the biophysical domain provides the material components of the environmental spaces where these interactions take place. Additionally, the biophysical domain provides opportunities for the various cultural practices enabled by environmental spaces. The environmental spaces and cultural practices (described in further detail below) both work to shape the biophysical domain. In the Cayman Islands, the reefs in Georgetown Harbour being threatened or lost by the port expansion project are the biophysical domain and the environmental spaces being examined in this chapter.

Environmental spaces are defined as the physical locations or sites in which humans and the societies and cultures they populate, interact within the eco-system. This can include meadows, streams, mountain tops, and in the context of the Cayman Islands, the beaches and reefs surrounding the islands. These spaces provide a context for the linking of the biophysical domain with cultural practices and cultural ecosystem benefits, as these spaces shape the biophysical domain and enable cultural practices and benefits.

In the case of the Cayman Islands, a majority of the environmental spaces which provide these benefits are reefs, beaches, lagoons and other marine environments surrounding the islands. Popular locations around the three islands (Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac) include Eden Rock, Devil's Grotto, Macabuca, Cheeseburger Reef, Seven Mile Beach and the USS Kittiwake.

Methods

This study was distributed via an online platform (Google Forms) through the Cayman Islands National Trust which posted the link to the survey on their social media on November 1, 2019. The survey had n = 175 responses, which is a very small portion of the Caymanian population, but with information saturation on topics such as the form of reef access that Caymanian's prefer.

Biographical Elements

Paul Sharits began by directing staged, narrative films between 1958 and 1965. However, in 1966, “in a rage of non-narrative commitment” (as he describes in his article “Exhibition/Frozen Frames”), he destroyed these films—only one of them, Wintercourse (1962), has been preserved and rediscovered. Summing up this period, Sharits describes these films as haikus, that is, general research into filmic temporality as instant composition.

It is touching to note that when he describes the evolution of his work, Sharits begins by mentioning this self-destruction on two separate occasions: in the articles “Exhibition/Frozen Frames” (1974) and “Hearing:Seeing” (1975). It is as if Sharits’ films originated in the destruction of previous images that were no longer wanted, that he no longer wanted to make and that must never be seen again. Of course, these origins prove to be more symbolic than realistic because the destruction of the narrative films dates to 1966 and the creation of the first “Sharitsian” film dates to 1965: Ray Gun Virus, his first flicker film (a rapid succession of frames chosen for their powerful contrasts—between positive and negative, different colors, and figuration and abstraction).

Sharits’ films belong to a historical current that was baptized “structural film,” a current that dominated experimental cinema between the late 1960s and late 1970s. Filmmakers belonging to this international movement were American (Sharits, George Landow, Hollis Frampton…), Canadian (Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland…), Austrian (Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka…), German (Birgit and Wilhelm Hein…) and English (Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal…). Of course, the work of each of these filmmakers is different but if it were necessary to determine their common denominator, two basic principles would be:

• 1. A structural film is a reflexive film, it is devoted to elucidating something about its own workings and therefore partaking in a description and even a definition of cinema;

• 2. A structural film is part of an overall investigation into film's properties and powers—or, more precisely, as Sharits describes it himself, “cinematics.

In common with most of its neighbors, the foreign policy of Peru after independence in 1821 focused on core interests that can be summarized as political sovereignty, territorial integrity, continental solidarity, and economic independence. Over the next 200 years, Peruvian foreign policy expanded in scope and direction; nevertheless, these four tenets continued to encapsulate the nation's external policy. Consequently, the permanent interests of Peru remain a logical place to begin an assessment of Peruvian foreign policy in the modern era.

Political Sovereignty

In the early years of independence, Peru struggled to decide whether it would divide, federate with Bolivia, or stand alone. Like most newly independent states, Peru achieved statehood long before it achieved nationhood, and it sometimes struggled to retain the former as it strived to develop the latter. From the outset, the Peruvian Diplomat Service played a decisive role in the legal defense of the national inheritance often in vast, encyclopedic defenses of Peruvian territorial claims. Over time, Peru faced nine wars (two with Chile, two with Colombia, two with Ecuador, and three with Bolivia). After each one, Peruvian diplomats negotiated a peace mostly on terms favorable to Peru. Having achieved political sovereignty in the nineteenth century, there was little serious challenge to it, apart from a few territorial issues, in the twentieth century.

The issue of political sovereignty surfaced again during the Castillo administration. In late 2021, former Bolivian president Evo Morales announced his intention to hold a meeting in Cuzco of RUNASUR, an organization that entertained vague plans of constructing a plurinational nation from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. In response to efforts to organize the Cuzco gathering, the Foreign Relations Committee of the Peruvian congress condemned what it termed the political activism of Morales and called for President Castillo to declare Morales persona non grata. A few days later, three former foreign ministers and eight former vice foreign ministers issued a joint statement denouncing the proposed RUNASUR forum as a clear threat to the national sovereignty, independence, and security of Peru. The Cuzco forum was later postponed; nevertheless, the declared objectives of RUNASUR remained a latent threat to the political sovereignty of Peru. The RUNASUR issue surfaced again during the demonstrations that swept Peru in 2022–23.

It is a critical commonplace to suggest that the Gothic is ‘a means of anti-Catholic expression’ (Purves 2009, 3), which, if it has a theology at all, has a single dominant ‘predominantly if not exclusively’ Protestant one (Sage 1988, xxi–xxii). This idea of a monolithic Protestant identity, self-defined in contrast to a feudal and barbaric Catholicism as monstrous Other, leads to the Gothic being read as denominational propaganda with anti-Catholicism as a key ‘Gothic ideology’ (Hoeveler 2014a, 5). However, the Gothic is far from uniformly and universally anti-Catholic. Maria Purves argues for a positive vision of Catholicism and a pro-Catholic impetus in a number of Gothic works and Alison Milbank builds on this by suggesting that the Gothic performs a double movement of ‘critique and appropriation’ (2018, 5) that mirrors the extra-fictional relation of the Anglican to the Catholic Church. These readings add complexity to a binary opposition between Protestant (Anglican) and Catholic and the assumption of a monolithic anti-Catholicism. They also offer insightful readings of a number of key Gothic texts. However, moving beyond the reproduction of a monolithic Protestantism/Anglicanism, arrayed against (or in relation with) a Catholic other allows us to more fully understand the complexity of the Gothic's depiction of the Catholic.

Understanding the Gothic as Anglican retains an implicit emphasis on the Gothic as anti-Catholic by rewriting the Protestant/Catholic binary of anti-Catholic accounts onto a distinction between Anglican and Catholic. The Gothic becomes a form of complex apologetics that justifies the Anglican Church's retention of Catholic elements and emphasises a shared history (and an apostolic succession) at the same time as reinforcing the rejection of Catholicism as an institution and of those Catholic doctrines not supported by the Anglican Church. In reality, however, the period was one of theological diversity within the Anglican Church and among Dissenting groups, involving fierce debates surrounding religious toleration which extended beyond Catholic/Anglican and broader Catholic/Protestant relations. Any focus on the Gothic as representing a single ideological focus risks eliding its engagement with wider questions of theo-politics, theology and institutional critique.

In A Backward Glance Wharton, weighing her own reactions to the stifling atmosphere of New York City, asks: “How could I understand that people who had seen Rome and Seville, Paris and London, could come back to live contentedly between Washington Square and the Central Park?” Central Park, the green lung of New York City was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Clavert Vaux. “The two envisioned” the 800 acres of uninterrupted rurality “as a pastoral retreat from the pressures and aesthetic monotony of a growing city, and historians and landscape architects have seen it reflected in their eyes, as a work of landscape art.” Central Park reveals a juxtaposition and tension between nature and the urban, pointing to a “threshold motif” in pastoral cosmopolitanism. “I pause on its threshold”—as Wharton mused in A Backward Glance, regarding her father's library to which she was perpetually drawn. We too, as readers, are invited to pause on New York City's green verge to assess how it resonates in her fiction. Rather than a permanent, immovable divider or partition, the park acts as a lush permeable membrane within the urban sprawl of imposing townhouses. What social contacts take place through it and despite it?

This chapter addresses how Central Park, which covers about six percent of Manhattan, becomes a vital site of environmental enquiry for Wharton. Pointed references to, and reflections upon, this serene area of woods, sweeping meadows and ponds are sprinkled throughout her novels, published journalism, novellas and short stories alike. In The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, the matriarch Mrs. Manson Mingott builds a house “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” There is impish wit in Wharton's lexis. This brand of “wilderness” pokes fun at that specific mode of American exceptionalism that separates a “New World” synonymous with cultural-nationalist vigor and pride from the “Old” and tired green spaces of Western Europe. The phrasing also acknowledges, and pays tribute to, the artificiality of Central Park, an audacious facsimile of untrammeled nature bounded by busy streets—an ingenious man-made enclave of pristine lakes that pretends to be a zone largely uncorrupted by man.

In 2019 I was working for a small non-profit on the northern coast of Haiti, near the port city of Cap-Haïtien. Historically, Cap-Haïtien was nicknamed The Paris of the Antilles for its great wealth and beauty as a former French Colony (see figure 1.1) (Liss & Knight, 1991). Today, Cap-Haïtien remains quite beautiful, retaining much of its colonial-era architecture, which is now steeped in vibrant Haitian culture and nestled between lush mountains and a sprawling turquoise bay. My work there involved coral reef restoration, or replanting coral to help bring the reef back to its former glory, and thus the brilliant blue waters are where I spent most of my time. Despite Haiti's rugged beauty, environmental degradation is abundant, and its coral reefs are heavily impacted. Much of the loss of coral reefs is due to there being a lack of ways to manage waste, pollution, overfishing, coastal development and a lack of cohesive environmental governance, which we define as political management combining government, non-profits, public participation and private-sector interests (Creary et al., 2008). Governance and government are not the same things, and this distinction is necessary for our book's central arguments to unfold. Government intervention includes actions like a fish and wildlife agency instituting catch-limit regulations on a fishery, whereas governance includes the activities of other actors such as communities, businesses and non-governmental organizations or NGOs (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006).

On an otherwise tranquil morning dive, I began to witness these impacts firsthand. A large shadow passed slowly over me, which turned out to not be a floating patch of Sargassum, a genus of seaweed commonly found in the Caribbean. Instead, it was an enormous floating mass of single-use plastics, such as the small yellow plastic vinegar bottles typical of Haiti (see figure 1.2). This marine debris had washed down from the mountains during a storm the night before, and was symbolic of the immense challenges facing Haitian coral reefs. Beachgoers as far as Corpus Christi, Texas, in the United States commonly find these same yellow vinegar bottles washed up on Gulf of Mexico beaches nearly 3,000 kilometers away, with missing diamond shapes, from bites taken from the bottles by sea turtles. The interconnectedness between coastal communities can often be traced in such a way.