Taylor argues that “plays to official events to grassroots protests and performance” should be considered a “means of storing and transmitting knowledge.”  She also states that “the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact”.  Taylor poses an important question;  if “we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity in the Americas have traditionally been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents, and include through the lens of the performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now?” (Location 120).  She believes that hidden “stories, memories, and struggles might become visible” (Location 120).    Taylor’s book explores many examples of communication and how different forms of communication can be combined and/or transmitted.   In addition, Taylor discusses why it is necessary to use multiple forms of communication in order ensure that the whole story is being told. She also explores how change can grow through the act of performance.  She illustrates this point through her discussion of the Peruvian theater group called Yuyachkani.  Hugo Salazar del Alcazr stated that “In Quechua, the expressions ‘I am thinking,’ “I am remembering,’ ‘I am your thought’ are translated by just one word:  Yuyachkani” (qtd in Taylor Location 2301).  Taylor argues that “the transitive notion of embodied memory encapsulated in Yuyachkani—the ‘I am remembering/I am your thought’—entails a relational, nonindividualistic understanding of subjectivity” (Location 2306).  The multi-ethnic theater group has been performing for over thirty years and have “participated in at least three interconnected survival struggles” (Location 2306).   The group has dealt with the civil conflict of Peru, “the diverse performances practices that have been obscured (and at times ‘disappeared’) in a racially divided, though multiethnic Peruvian culture…” and themselves as “…artists who have worked together in the face of political, personal, and economic crisis” (Location 2306).  Taylor explains that Yuyachkani through “self-naming is a performative declarative announcing its belief that social memory links and implicates communities in the transitive mode of formation” (Location 2311).   Social memories cannot be completely “captured” or shielded from corruption in a written archive but “multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, reconstituting themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next” (Location 2318).  Cultural memories coexist simultaneously alongside written archives and at times in opposition.