More than 40 years after the storied performance troupe was born at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission District, Culture Clash co-founder Richard Montoya reflected on the long, artistically rich journey since.

“There’s something about the American character that’s embodied in this group that’s made up of Salvadorans (Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas) and a Chicano (Montoya himself),” he said. “We’ve grafted onto that character that we can be of service to an audience. We can help those voices in the margins.

“Those are the moments I look back on and I’m so proud of: when we’re in a jail in Miami interviewing three African-American inmates; when we’re at the border interviewing a crosser; when we’re in a house of worship talking to rabbis and Jewish congregants; when we’re meeting Jesuits and Lutherans and sanctuary people. This is when we’re at our best.”

Richard Montoya, left, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza make up Culture Clash. The Chicano theater troupe is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. (Estevan Oriol)

In a collaborative career that has mingled sociopolitical satire, broad comedy and documentary-style theater, the members of Culture Clash have been not only innovative and entertaining, but activists and a collective voice for the voiceless.

“My daughter,” said Ric Salinas, “tells me ‘Dad, you were woke before there was woke.’”

Next Sunday at the Balboa Theatre in San Diegos Gaslamp Quarter, Montoya, Siguenza and Salinas are reuniting for “Culture Clash’s 40th Anniversary Desmadre,” a celebratory performance that they emphasize will be fresh and all-new material, not “oldies but goodies.” (“Desmadre is a way of saying chaos in Spanish.) Joining them will be Chicana performer/podcaster Mala Munoz and musician/composer Michael Roth.

Culture Clash enjoys a close and longstanding relationship with audiences on both side of the San Diego/Tijuana border, as well as with La Jolla Playhouse and the bygone San Diego Repertory Theatre.

San Diego, said Siguenza, “was a second home for us for a while in the ‘90s and 2000s. We have to give (longtime San Diego Rep Artistic Director) Sam Woodhouse credit. He got us into the regional theater system. Once we were in that system, other artistic directors knew about us and said ‘We want them too.’ It opened up our career in so many ways.”

“Sam was the first one to commission us with a site-specific work (‘Culture Clash in Bordertown’). We went to a region and invested a bunch of time on both sides of the border, and there was a lot of rigor in that. We interviewed some of the most amazing people in Tijuana and brought that back; then we’d go talk to a wealthy socialite in La Jolla. That was our baptism into site-specific work.”

A scene from Culture Clash in Bordertown, a 1999 play by the Chicago theater troupe Culture Clash, pictured from left Richard Montoya, Herbert Sizuenza and Ric Salinas. CULTURE CLASH

Salinas, who lives in L.A.s Silverlake community, recalled the evolution of the Culture Clash audience in the San Diego/Tijuana region.

“We got Barrio Logan Chicanos, we even got rich La Jolla Chicanos, and theatergoers who were subscribers. They all kept coming back, changing our audience from being mostly Anglo, elderly people, to raucous Chicanos, African Americans, Asians, you name it,” Salinas said.

Added Montoya: “What also blew our minds was Tijuana was a world we’d never really seen. And we could go from Tijuana to the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. That owed back to our beginnings — we began in an art gallery in the Mission District. There’s no hiding the fact that we were never birthed in a theater. We were birthed in an art gallery.”

Culture Clash, which Montoya said was heavily influenced by Luis Valdez’s Chicano theater troupe El Teatro Campesino, came to national prominence with a sketch variety show (titled “Culture Clash”) on the Fox television network that ran from 1993-’96.

“Radio Mambo” in ’96 was the trio’s first stage performance at San Diego Rep. Other Culture Clash shows produced there included “Bordertown,” “Water & Power,” “Culture Clash in AmeriCCA” and a best-of “Culture Clash Anthology” show.

The members of Culture Clash, front to back, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza and Richard Montoya in a promotional photo for their 2006 play Water & Power A Los Angeles Story at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. SCNG.

Over the years, the Rep also produced shows written by Montoya or by Siguenza, who was a a Rep artist in residence for several years.

“The Mission” and “Zorro in Hell” enjoyed productions at La Jolla Playhouse as did Montoya’s “American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose,” the cast of which included Montoya and Siguenza.

None of this was foreseen in the beginning back at that nonprofit art gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco.

“We didn’t have a lofty mission statement,” said Siguenza, who now teaches Chicano theater history at San Diego City College and just cowrote a play with Carlos Martin titled The Many Sins of Diego Rivera.

“We started as out-of-work Latino actors who wanted to do something, Siguenza said. We had to write our own ticket because no one was casting us in the Bay area. We became writers out of necessity and we found our own stages out of necessity. Somehow we got discovered,” Siguenza said.

Salinas recalled: “We are all urban kids. It was during the MTV phase when we started. We are definitely a bicultural, bilingual group. We speak fluent English. We rarely do Spanish onstage — we use Spanglish. The name Culture Clash even says that. We’re a unique group.”

Herbert Siguenza, left, Ric Salinas and Richard Montoya in Culture Clash in Americca in 2003. SCNG

That being said, the troupe early on had to fight for respect, even in the San Diego border region.

“We were being criticized as clowns not to be taken seriously,” Montoya remembered, citing what is now UC San Diegos Department of Chicanx and Latinx Studies as one critic. “We were dismissed and reducted down, when actually we came out of a pretty serious theater moment in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s that caught the tail end of El Teatro Campesino.”

Montoya later added that today “We’re celebrating 40 years of not being canceled.”

But as the critically acclaimed productions came and the audiences grew and diversified, the respect came, too, for the members of Culture Clash as writers and performers.

“There’s a realness to our acting,” said Siguenza. “We’re authentic. We’re not trying to act.”

Richard Montoya, left, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza in Culture Clash Anthology: A 15-Year Retrospective in 1999. CRAIG SCHWARTZ

For Salinas, “The biggest compliment we get is that people think we improvise a lot in our show, but we really don’t. About 90 percent is written down exactly as we deliver it. We’re like jazz players — when somebody does a riff the other guys pick up on it. That’s how we’ve been doing it for 40 years.”

That longstanding collaboration “takes three engines,” said Montoya. “Every time I’ve been the lead writer on something so fascinating, they get a hold of it and demolish it, break it open like a piñata and hand it back to me. Then it gets good.”

Over those 40 years, “As artists, we’ve gotten smarter and better,” said Siguenza. “Chicano theater is still young, it’s still changing. I watched an early Culture Clash show and man, we were really good for that age. Then I saw a videotape of ‘Culture Clash Still in America’ that we did in 2020, our last fully produced show at Berkeley Rep, and that was great too. We were basically the same group — we just got better at what we do.”

Changing society, politics, cultural transitions and cross-border issues have only provided more fodder for comment and comedy.

“Satire has kept us alive for 40 years,” said Salinas, “for how many presidents, for how many groups we’ve outlived. Whatever the political climate, whatever social commentary that we have to give back to our audience, we’ve got both ethos and pathos.

“Things repeat and there are generations of people who come see us. We have people who are grandparents, and now their grandchildren come,” Salinas said.

There’s more ahead after this 40-year celebration, too.

Montoya, a father of two who lives in the L.A. area, is now writing a play about his late father, the poet Jose Montoya, one that “has me wrestling with the poetry and the legacy. The poems he left for us are great drama. I’m essentially asking the question ‘Can a poem be haunted?’ And the answer is yes. That investigation is ripe for the next phase of at least my plays, and I hope to entice the guys into them.”

Richard Montoya, left, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza in Culture Clash in Bordertown, commissioned by San Diego Repertory Theatre in 1998. The Chicano theater trio based the play on more than 100 interviews with local residents. (Culture Clash)

With a history that’s four decades long, the members of Culture Clash shared some special moments that have occurred along the way.

For Salinas it was a performance of the trio’s then-world premiere “Chavez Ravine” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2003.

“That play (about the displacement of many Mexican Americans from the L.A. neighborhood that now includes Dodger Stadium) utilized vaudeville, it utilized the humor that we’d grown up with, our Culture Clash brand and also the interview process,” said Salinas.

“That when our pistons were going high, Salinas continued. “I’ll never forget having some of the members of the community that we interviewed in the audience, now in their late 80s and 90s. They stood up and got acknowledged. It was one of the highest points in Culture Clash history.”

For Montoya, a Grateful Dead fan, opening night of “American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose” at La Jolla Playhouse in 2012 stands out.

“After the show I took the elevator up to a party,” he remembered. “When the elevator door opened, hunched over in it was Bill Walton. He goes ‘Great play, man!’ And as the door was closing he kicked out a Grateful Dead lyric — ‘black-throated wind.’ That’s the title of a Dead song about an American night. Bill Walton was checking with me to see if I knew my Dead history.

“I’m remembering his generosity. Something like that could only happen at the Playhouse,” Montoya said.

Siguenza’s reminiscences aren’t confined to a single night or performance, but to one of the troupe’s traveling rituals over the years.

“I was in the airport the other day,” he said, “and I told my daughter that when we were touring we were usually late to get to our planes. We were so late that we couldn’t check our bags. So I took the props bag in with me — this was before 9/11.

“The guy opened it up and he takes out stockings. He takes out ‘knives,’ ‘guns,’ a ‘scud missile’ that actually says scud missile with a clock on it. I started busting up and he said ‘This is not funny.’ If that happened today, I would go to jail.”

Culture Clash’s 40th Anniversary Desmadre

When: 7: 30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3

Where: Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave., downtown

Tickets: $51.50 and up

Phone: (800) 653-8000

Online: sandiegotheatres.org