According to Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, this flowering of theatrical expression had deep roots in "the vast majority of Chicanos [having]...limited access to literacy and education. Chicano literary expression," she noted,

has been largely popular in form and oral in transmission...the Chicano movement in the late sixties and early seventies...validate[d] popular and oral forms of cultural expression and...counter[ed] the lack of access to the mainstream literary establishment with the creation of a Chicano communications network...[including] community newspapers featuring the work of local, grass-roots poets...Chicano literary magazines and publishing houses.

The Chicano theater groups that emerged were part of this effort.

Most teatros were community-based and represented a blending of the old and the new. Actos generally dramatized such community concerns as drug abuse, problems in the schools, and police brutality. Pastorelas, or shepherds' plays, the traditional Nativity dramas dating to 16th-century Mexico when Spanish missionaries incorporated indigenous language, costumes, and dance into their religious plays, are still performed every year at Christmas time to enthusiastic audiences.

Dialogue reflected complex patterns of acculturation and resistance to the dominant Anglo culture. The language of Chicano theater was characterized by a mixture of English and Spanish, sometimes within one sentence. As Jorge Huerta described it,

...the more recent arrivals from Mexico speak little or no English, while most Chicanos usually speak both Spanish and English to varying degrees. The majority of the plays produced for audiences will reflect this linguistic particularity, employing a mixture of Spanish and English as well as calo, the language of the streets....Many Mexicans who do not speak English can understand it, and many Chicanos who do not communicate in Spanish can recognize the language of their parents...By addressing a bilingual public, teatros are asserting a very definite particularity that may arouse resentment among the non-bilingual members of the audience, especially the English-speakers....however, most teatros speak to their specific communities, in their own languages.

Valdez's concerns about artistic growth and development led him to organize the first Chicano theater festival. Held in Fresno in 1970, the festival showed the teatros new ways of approaching material and diverse styles from which to draw. Fifteen groups, including the Revelationists from New York, Pedro Santaliz's Nuevo Teatro Pobre de America from Puerto Rico/New York, and Los Mascarones