DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Research and teaching interests

Linguistic anthropology, cultural Anthropology, urban studies, racialization, migration, chronotopes, sociophonetics, semiotics of race, indigenous diasporas, the Andean region, South America, Latin America, Spain, queer indigeneity, queer Latin America, queer theory.

Biography

Diego Arispe-Bazán is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist; his research centers on the production and circulation of history via linguistic and discursive strategies. More specifically, he focuses on the schism that divides different community’s valorizations of the colonial past in Latin America, and how differences in dialectal Spanish forms reaffirm ideas of national belonging which are, in fact, ordered around colonial racial and gender hierarchies. His ethnographic and semiotic research follows a fine-grained approach to understanding the composition of categories of race and class in Latin America as intertwined colonial processes. 

He received his Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, affiliated with the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Anthropology. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and his teaching has been recognized by the Center for Teaching & Learning at the University of Pennsylvania and NAFSA: The Association of International Educators. His most recent research project follows diasporic Andean indigenous communities in the US and Europe, with a focus on queer indigenous subjects.

His current book project, Making History: Spanish Labor Migrants in 20th Century Lima moves between Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain, and investigates how migration is impacted by shifts in the global economic system. The book follows a few of the twenty thousand Spanish citizens who migrated to Peru after the 2008 Spanish economic crisis. Their incursion into upwardly mobile, middle class spaces in Lima triggered competition not only over jobs, but over the legacy of Spanish colonization and, by extension, the meaning of history itself. Migrants’ increasingly successful entry into Peruvian labor markets generated conflict with the local middle class, whose mestizo members consistently reinforce colonial racial and class hierarchies by devaluing Black and Indigenous labor and lifeways. Middle-class Peruvians therefore decry the colonial enterprise as oppressive while actively participating in it. Thus, coloniality comes to be animated by migrants and upwardly-mobile locals alike. 

Selected publications & media

Arispe‐Bazán, D. (2021). Disreputable Spaniards Versus Middle‐Class Limeños: The Coloniality of Speech in Lima, Peru. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(1), 43-63. 

Arispe‐Bazán, D. (Producer/Host). (2018, May 27). Care In/Out the Clinic (No. 13)

[Audio podcast episode]. In Anthropological Airwaves: Official Podcast of American Anthropologist. American Anthropological Assoc. https://www.americananthropologist.org/podcast/care-inout-the-clinic-feat-carolyn-sufrin-and-xochitl-marsili-vargas 

Arispe‐Bazán, D. (Producer/Host). (2018, Aug 2). Race & Language (No. 9) [Audio podcast episode]. In Anthropological Airwaves: Official Podcast of American Anthropologist. American Anthropological Assoc. https://www.americananthropologist.org/podcast/race-and-language 

Arispe‐Bazán, D. (Producer/Host). (2017, Sept 4). Immigration, Discourse, and Trump's Border Wall (No. 5). In Anthropological Airwaves: Official Podcast of American Anthropologist. American Anthropological Assoc. https://www.americananthropologist.org/podcast/immigration-discourse-and-trumps-border-wall

Arispe‐Bazán, D. (2016). The Making of a Visual Anthropology Program: An Interview with Gisela Cánepa and María Eugenia Ulfe, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. American Anthropologist, 118(1), 172-175.

Conference Committee

Bi-Annual Thinking Andean Studies Conference

https://thinkingandeanstudies.com/