Folk dance fulfills a particular function in the survival of communal memory. Community history and identity live through the animated body. But in the case of El Güegüence, Nicaragua's hybrid Spanish-Nahuatl dance-drama, many feel it is a contested tradition with a contested set of significations. Within that contestation, communal memory is fractured and ruptured in ways that produce a unique and dynamic discourse.

In this paper, I will focus on Irene López's reworking of El Güegüence as the dance piece El Gran picaro. López has been criticized for altering the “authentic” dance tradition, a criticism she answers by pointing out that the original dance was lost when only the artifact of the dramatic text was preserved. López's reworking functions as collective memory and as an act of restored tradition, an invention meant to stand in for the original as faithfully as the inventor can imagine.

I will also examine the redeployment of El Güegüence by groups who have embraced the figure and the act of dancing the masked drama as an expression of the subaltern, the marginalized, and the closeted minority identities within the context of the national culture, specifically Grupo Relajo, with its playful workshops built around the popular story. Ultimately, El Güegüence represents an artifact of the erasure of dance and, by extension, the indigenous body. Both López and Grupo Relajo, through their staging, resurrect the body of the indigenous Other and create a vehicle for the body to move in resistance to such erasure.