La Sierra and La Costa: Socially Motivated Intra-Speaker Variation in Peruvian Vowel Spaces

In this article, I use quantitative sociophonetic data to shed light on the construction of identity in the context of Peruvian politics. Specifically, I analyse the dynamic vowel space of former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo within and across a set of discourse events. I situate this quantitative analysis within a framework of agentive, bricolage-like stylistic performance, analysing how Castillo recruits his vowels in the service of identity projects that rest on shifting degrees of (dis)alignment with two imagined communities that are salient in the Peruvian imaginary and which are constructed in opposition to one another: la sierra and la costa. I consider Castillo’s stylistic performance in relation to that of his second-round opponent in Peru’s 2021 elections, Keiko Fujimori, and ultimately identify two different ways that bricolage-like stylistic performance is engaged in here, which I propose to label contrastive mirroring and additive mirroring.