Blood, organs and other tissues for sale: Diamela Eltit's Impuesto a la carne and the afterwards of the neoliberal development in Latin America.

As Marx elaborated in Capital: Volume I at the moment human labour is sold, the subject participates in an ominous plot where she/he becomes a commodity. In a capitalist mode of production, the subject’s alienation from his/her humanity occurs because the individuals can only express labor through a privately-owned system of production in which he/she is an instrument, an object. This dehumanization process submits the subject under the exchange transactions of the market, where labor value is detached from the production process and it becomes abstract. Once in the market as a commodity, the subject's relationship with others changes since the material, political and personal paradigms are transformed. The sale represents in this dilemma, the main exchange activity in which the market circulates commodities and reproduces itself, its market's vascular system. In the Chilenean writer Diamela Eltit's narratives, the body have been represented several times as part of sale transactions, in which it is consumed, manipulated and eventually thrown away as garbage. In Impuesto a la carne (2010) Diamela Eltit uses the image of a hyperbolic sale of human bodies, blood and organs to represent how the neoliberal development in Latin America has radicalized the objectification of the subject and surpasses his/her psychological and physical limits.

The main purpose of the study is to examine through grounded theory, obtained from different data sources, how cultural differences in a multicultural Community of Practice (COP) were influencing participation and non-participation, how the negotiated relation between them were shaping dynamics, and dynamics were shaping participation and non-participation, in order that some of the COP member’s voice could be heard.

With eight members in the COP and the professor; seven cultures were represented within these nine persons. Interviews, observations, field notes, a journal, and postings were the sources from which the data were collected, analyzed, and codified. Cultural differences and participation were the main themes obtained as a result of the analyses. Participation, interaction, class organization, and a professor-centered class were further discussed as main topics that emerged from the grounded theory.

Based on the idea that literacy practices are the cultural forms of using written language (Barton et al. 2000), this study examines home-literacy practices of four Mexican immigrant families living in the West of Canada. Data was collected through such ethnographic research methods as interviews, observations, field notes, and photographs. Some findings were that home-literacy practices were used by parents and children to keep in touch with their home country, their social networks, and their culture; furthermore, they are a way to preserve and share their cultural practices and their cultural heritage.

The Indian chroniclers, after Prehispanic cities fell around 1530, were some of the first to shed light on this New World land, set within a Peruvian valley. The assimilation of American geography offered a great influx of stories and legends that captured and refreshed the imagination of the Iberian Peninsula. Hispanic literature elaborated upon how the medieval land of Cockaigne is represented as a landscape or space of abundance, wealth and pleasure, becoming the America cornucopia, also addressed as land of Jauja. My work analyses how this geographical referent traveled from Europe to America and how it returned.