Culture Clash: Taking their 40th Anniversary on the road

The iconic Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, featuring Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza, returns to San Diego for a special performance celebrating its 40th Anniversary. It will take place at the historic Balboa Theatre on Sunday, November 3, with tickets going on sale today at 10am.

“Culture Clash’s 40th Anniversary Desmadre” is an all-new show honoring their 40 years of comedy, which they’ve presented on stages throughout the United States, on television, in films and online.  Longtime friend collaborator Kirk Ward and hilarious standup comedian Mala Muñoz will join them, with pianist Michael Roth accompanying Culture Clash throughout the evening, cabaret-style.

The upcoming performance comes on the heels of their “May the 40^th Be With You” extravaganza at CSUN’s The Soraya Theatre in front of an enthusiastic audience of 1,700 this past May 4th. You can read Gustavo Arellano’s review of the show here.

Satirical, thought-provoking, relevant, but most importantly, hilarious, the three brothers-in-arms have turned their sharp gaze on topics such as Chicanismo, border issues, politics, religion, sexual identity, and much more via their many stage productions, including “Chavez Ravine,” “Culture Clash in AmeriCCa,” “Sapo,” “Bowl of Beings,” "Bordertown" and “Radio Mambo,” to name just a few.

Through their collective work and projects, Montoya, Siguenza, and Salinas have explored the evolution of Latinx culture with humor, outrage, and, yes, respect.

A long-time fan, I’ve followed Culture Clash since their move from the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s, attending many of their shows and even buying out the house of one of their local performances.

I enjoyed having a Zoom conversation with the three shortly after their May performance. It was supposed to be a Q&A, but once the conversation started, it was pretty hard to keep up with their riffing, ribbing and rapid repartee.  So here we go …

Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

How did "May the Fourth Be With You" come about?

Richard Montoya (RM): We wanted to celebrate [having reached] the 40-year mark as a group, a collective, still being very much playwrights and activists and content creators, filmmakers and all those things. We wanted to hit the stage with new material and look at our 40 years together and the people and the shoulders that we stand on. We didn't want to do a golden oldie show at the Holiday Inn in Northridge. It was an emotional night very; it was electric. It was a real shot in the arm for Chicansimo and it was a shot in the arm for Salvadoreños, too, because Rick and Herb are Salvi. It was a moment to talk about Gaza, to go into some tricky waters, and to really hope and pray for a peaceful two-state solution between Pacoima and Boyle Heights.

Herbert Siguenza (HS): We started with a lot of videos and photographs that we have, [going] through our archives and sending each other photos, putting together a half-hour video prior to the show. So as people sat down, they saw the immense history that we have, from starting in an art gallery in San Francisco on Cinco de Mayo 1984, when we were founded by (the late artist and activist) Rene Yañez. It started as a weekend of comedy, a comedy fiesta.

Rick Salinas (RS): Then we got booked the following weekend. Then we got booked once a month. Then, if we were lucky, we got booked twice a month, and our credibility rose. We played at El Teatro Campesino with Luis Valdez, joining forces for a summer. But the show that we did at the Soraya was almost a throwback to how we first began. There used to be six of us, with (playwright and performer) Monica Palacios, (comedian and writer) Marga Gómez and (the late artist, poet and writer) José Antonio Burciaga. It was like a cabaret, a vaudeville act. It's like “Chicano Sabado Gigante.” But the papers never reviewed us, and we wanted to legitimize our writing. And so that's when we started to write plays, and once you write a play, you get reviewed, and you could hold that review and send it to presenters, and you could travel the world, you know, travel to the United States. But doing the show, it was a throwback man. A big Chicanada. It was like playing La Peña and Berkeley way back in the day or when we were at Los Angeles Theatre Center doing our plays down at that theater.

Although it wasn’t strictly an oldies show, you did some classics.

HS: I did Julio Iglesias, an old favorite that I hadn't done in 20 years, but in a brand-new context. We captured the Spaniard on stage, and for his punishment, he had to read all the books and emails of Doctor Rudy Acuña and then listen to the musical stylings of Aztlan Underground.

RM: We also brought Che Guevara back from the dead, but we had to ask him what his preferred pronouns are.

RS: I did a tribute to Jose Antonio Burciaga, he's one of our founding members. He would go up on stage and be like a Chicano Will Rogers. 

What was the reaction to the show?

RM: 1,700 Chicanos found their way to The Soraya that night and what they found was a kind of a retuning and re-education of all the things that we've learned and that we know. We are constantly fighting to get people to know who Jose Antonio Burciaga, to reread the works of Che Guevara, to know who Lolita Lebrón is, all these, historical figures. So, like John Leguizamo in that sense, “Latin History for Dummies,” but we're not doing it for dummies.

HS: We really planted our flag, saying this is the kind of comedy we grew up with. This is the kind of comedy we've done and will continue to do, because comedy and satire have been under attack. And a lot of it is from people that have no context of what satire is or where our satire comes from.

RS: I got this from people telling me, that the old generation … they [already] know us. They would look back, and they couldn't believe how much laughter was coming out of these 20-somethings, whether they were CSUN students or just sons and daughters of people bringing them to the show. We blew them out of the water. They've never seen anything like us. 

What’s next for Culture Clash?

HS: We’re committed to each other, to continue working and develop new stuff or revising old stuff, bring back old stuff with a new sheen on it. I guess I can announce that it looks like we might be going to Cuba next April. I think we're the perfect ambassadors to go to Havana and present Chicano humor to them and collaborate with them as well while we're there.

RM: This 40^th Anniversary show, I think it's just a seed of the possibilities of the next 10 years for Culture Clash. I mean, Los Lobos just turned 50. So, we'll see what happens in 10 years for us.

RS: You know, the whole thing with Jose Antonio Burciaga just really turned me on. We could like an hour show, easily with his murals, with his poetry. 

RM: And we're setting up a scholarship for young people through the CSUN Library, like a Culture Clash scholarship between Chicano Studies and the librarians, who are really cool crew of people.

Besides the upcoming shows, what do each of you have going individually?

RM: I'm an independent filmmaker. I co-directed the Carlos Almaraz film called "Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire" that's still on Netflix and am working on a beautiful documentary right now about master printmaker Richard Duardo.

HS: I've been working with a group called Onstage Playhouse and they've been producing my own scripts there, creating a theatre community here in San Diego.

RS: Oh, I'm redoing my kitchen.

“Culture Clash’s 40th Anniversary Desmadre”

Sunday, November 3, 7:30pm

Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Avenue, San Diego 92101