Theater in Latin America is known to be a force for social change and so is often looked at not as entertainment but as a vehicle to make a statement. Carballido's work fits well within this tradition. His work is what can be called socially engaged.

Eugene Skinner in Dramatists in Revolt: The New Latin America Theater commented on I, Too, Speak of the Rose and labeled this work a masterpiece. "It delineates the repressive effects of ideologies and institutions through popular satire and alternating scenes of commentary and representation." For Skinner this play seems a complete work and shows what theater should do. Margaret Sayers Peden in Emilio Carballido agreed with the significance of this play. She said it was "the most important one-act play written by Carballido, and one of his best plays of any length."

In the Latin American Theatre Review Sandra Messinger Cypess said "Carbalhdo's one-act play has one of the most provocative titles of the many suggestive works" by this playwright. Diana Taylor in the International Dictionary of Theatre: Plays saw this work as being about discourse, or the nature of discourse. "Discourses not only stem from differing traditions and create their own realities, but they also vie for explanatory power and authority." She saw this work as making a statement about a lessened importance of a eurocentric (white European) society as represented by the idea and talk of the professors. What emerges is another way of seeing things, or many ways of seeing things, which may be rooted in an oral culture, not one based on writing.

Jacqueline Eyring Bixler in the Latin American Theatre Review commented on later works by Carballido that gave evidence of characteristics which were consistent throughout his body of work. She mentioned two patterns of audience participation, that of fusion and that of fission. This latter, the fission, "produces an opposition or fission of impressions, which leads to a final fusion of concept. The pattern of fission, which is the one that characterizes Carballido's theatre, is naturally the more challenging for the audience, who is left to close the fissure, or bridge the conceptual gap." She saw this as allowing the audience to have a moment of seeing discovery. For her, this was participatory theatre, because the audience adds to the meaning of the piece, as they make the connection conceptually between the different levels of reality that exist in the play.

From the very beginning of his career Carballido attempted to mix fantasy and realism. According to George Woodyard in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, he has done that in new ways in I, Too, Speak of the Rose. At the same time he has been involved with experimental works "in his search for ways to express a Mexican reality deeply rooted in tradition."

In the play, Tona reflects on the star and its connection with the ancient primitive hunter and the artwork he produced on the walls of his cave. Skinner sees this as a statement the playwright makes about the real function of art. "The artist produces an image that persists long after the event or person represented ceases to exist. The sole function of the artist is to affirm... the existence of his contemporaries as a complex web of creative potential." Peden, who has written extensively about Carballido's works, saw his most important contribution as being the personal blend of humor and fantasy in a realistic framework. These "create plays that transcend the specifically realistic and restrictively Mexican to achieve a theater that can be called modern, contemporary, and universal."...