Analysis of El Teatro Campesino’s work is not very extensive in the literature. There are a few key scholars who have written on El Teatro Campesino, but not particularly extensively, and not many of them have analyzed La Carpa de los Rasquachis in particular. 

As I mentioned previously, one of the seminal texts on the work of El Teatro Campesino is Yolanda Gonzalez-Broyles’ El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement; her book is a history of the ensemble that serves as a counter-narrative to some of the previous books on the group by choosing to focus on the ensemble as a collective rather than on the individual contributions of the group’s founding artistic director, Luis Valdez. 

Jorge Huerta’s books Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms and Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth both include sections on El Teatro Campesino, but their focus is more on the group’s impact on the historical development of Chicano theater as a genre more broadly. Chicano Theater treats La Carpa de los Rasquachis fairly extensively, but much of the focus is on an earlier form of the play with significant differences; said version of the play focuses much more on the relationship between the life of the protagonist and the cosmic scale –the ending even includes the return of a figure who occupies the space of both Christ and Quetzalcoatl (Huerta 1982, 201-6). In fact, Huerta’s analysis centers around that cosmic scale, and it’s featured in a chapter entitled “The Chicano Cosmos.”

In Tomas Ybarra-Frausto’s essay “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” Ybarra-Frausto specifically mentions “The early Actos of El Teatro Campesino” in a list entitled “Rasquachismo: A Random List” (Ybarra-Frausto 7). As an early part of the Chicano movement, El Teatro Campesino is part of the body of work critics like Ybarra-Frausto analyze in defining rasquache as a category. Therefore, El Teatro Campesino’s aesthetic is at the very foundations of rasquachismo.