In San Juan Bautista, a town 37 miles northeast of Monterey, chickens still roam downtown streets, and the air is thick with the scents of cabbage and berry crops this time of year. The San Benito County town is most famous for its Spanish mission, the only California mission to have never interrupted its weekly Masses and the one that spelled doom for James Stewart and Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

But if San Juan Bautista is best known as an iconic movie set, it’s also home to the first major Chicano theater in the country: el Teatro Campesino — Farmworkers Theater — which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.

ETC’s venue suits its town and its name. A former vegetable warehouse, the theater’s administrative office still has a walk-in freezer, which, though no longer active, offers the building’s only cool respite in the heat of summer.

ETC’s main audience demographic is one that’s vastly underrepresented at most Bay Area theaters: working- and middle-class Latino families. Parents and children eat dinner together on the theater’s wide porch before shows, and no one shushes the littlest ones as they make comments and ask questions during a performance.

No one shushes the company’s emerging young artists either. Producing Artistic Director Kinan Valdez, son of ETC founder Luis Valdez, has even given Christy Sandoval and Emily Morales, two young artists at the theater, the reins to direct and produce ETC’s anniversary show, “Viva la Causa.”

For them, ETC is an artistic oasis. “I hear the complaints in regional American theater now,” Sandoval said. “There aren’t Chicanos being represented on stage. It’s a nationwide thing. I’m fortunate. Why would we ever leave this place? Every show we do here is entrenched in a beautiful, rich culture. ... Every single piece has a lesson or message.”

On the picket lines

That artistic purpose dates back to the company’s origins. Founded in 1965 during the Delano grape strike, ETC helped organize the Central Valley’s grape pickers into the United Farm Workers union. Under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong, the UFW fought for higher wages and better working conditions for farmworkers in California and eventually nationwide.

ETC performed on the strike’s picket lines and in the flatbeds of trucks in farm fields. Its theatrical form was the acto, an agitprop sketch with multiple goals: to chronicle and validate the farmworkers’ plight at a time when no one else did; to ridicule the opposition (farm bosses were typically costumed in pig snouts) to make it more approachable; and to suggest solutions — boycotting, striking — aimed at inspiring audiences to social action.

In devising the new show, Morales, Sandoval and six other contributing writers knew they wanted to create a retrospective that honored that history, embodied in the show’s title — “Viva la Causa” refers to the campaign to unionize Mexican American farmworkers and invokes the Chicano movement as a whole. They knew they wanted to make the production immersive, inviting audience members to explore different rooms in their facility for the first time. And they knew it should be a series of short plays, one for each of ETC’s traditional forms: mito (myth), corrido (Mexican folk ballad) and historia (history), as well as the acto.

But it wasn’t until weeks before last weekend’s opening that Sandoval and Morales realized they needed to settle on just what la Causa means for the company, both today and in the future.

“We realized, unfortunately, it’s still the same,” Sandoval said. “It’s still searching for self-determination of Chicanos and Chicanas in the United States. It’s still fighting for our culture to be recognized and represented. The cause is not over.”

Ethnic theaters

With that decision, ETC stands out among ethnic-specific theaters in the region. Although many such groups are going strong in the Bay Area, such as African-American Shakespeare Company, and newer ones like Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company are already wielding sizable influence, others are in tenuous positions, or gone. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre has not been producing regularly since it lost two venues and its two founders died. Traveling Jewish Theatre and Asian American Theater Company both closed their doors in 2011.

Often when these companies close, it’s not for only financial reasons; mission also plays a part. If a company’s goal is to get the mainstream to embrace its ethnic group, and it succeeds to some degree, there might be a logic to declaring mission accomplished and disbanding. When Traveling Jewish Theatre closed, its executive director, Sara Schwartz Geller, said the decision was partly motivated by doubt about “whether there is still a need for a specifically Jewish theater in the Bay Area.”

ETC is supported in part by the San Benito County Arts Council, the Hewlett Foundation and others, and it has other equally important assets: the sheer number of young artists who are intensely dedicated to it, as well as the positions of power that those young artists hold.

In many major Bay Area theaters, an aspiring professional must amass a sizable resume just to land an internship, and 35 might be considered young for a leader. It’s hard to imagine many local theater companies handing over their 50th anniversary main-stage show to a bunch of twentysomethings, let alone when the company is a historic troupe that has toured Europe, succeeded on Broadway and in Hollywood (with “Zoot Suit,” a 1979 play and 1981 film), and worked with Peter Brook, considered one of the greatest living directors in the English-speaking world.

What’s particularly notable about Sandoval and Morales, the leaders of “Viva La Causa,” is that they’re both women, which they describe as a “very intentional” choice by the ensemble.

‘Great man’ history

In 1984, Yolanda Broyles, who now heads the American Ethnic Studies department at Kansas State University, published an influential article, “Women in El Teatro Campesino: ‘¿Apoco Estaba Molacha La Virgen de Guadalupe?’” in which she accused ETC of subscribing to a “great man” vision of its own history. ETC, she wrote, “canonized” its story as “the ‘life and times’ of Luis Valdez,” ignoring the substantial contributions of its other artists, especially its women, and relegating women actors to stereotyped characters.

For their parts, Sandoval and Morales say that they’re fortunate to march on a trail already blazed by female predecessors at ETC, such as Rosa Escalante, Rosa Apodaca and Socorro Valdez, and that they no longer face the sexism that Broyles observed decades ago. Still, with “Viva La Causa,” they have shrewdly acknowledged the complexity of fighting for a movement that’s 50 years old, and responded to the way the company’s immense legacy can both privilege and burden a new generation of artists.

Mirror of political climate

Each act of the play is part of an auction. Performers offer artifacts from the company’s history; audience members carry paddles with which to bid on, say, a “beautiful, ugly old mask” from one show, or a revolucionario character featured in another. The concept riffs on “Los Vendidos,” Valdez’s 1967 play set in “Honest Sancho’s Used Mexican Lot and Mexican Curio Shop,” where a secretary to Gov. Ronald Reagan shops for different Mexican robots — i.e. stereotypes.

The auction concept, Sandoval says, came from reflecting on our current political climate, which includes Donald Trump’s tirades against Mexican immigrants and his boast that he’d build a border wall. “It wasn’t a far stretch to think of a world where all this was condemned or banned, illegal,” she said. “So we just kind of went to that extreme: What if the teatro did not exist anymore?”

“This is happening right now,” Morales says. “Who’s to say that 15 years from now, it couldn’t look like this? It’s not really an exaggeration.”

“OK, we’ve celebrated 50 years,” Sandoval says. “What does that mean? Do we have 50 years more, or do we quit while we’re ahead? This is it, all this turns into a museum?”

New possibilities

Raising that question, says Morales, “jolted everybody.” If ETC no longer existed, Sandoval says, “then we wouldn’t have our culture represented. Where would people learn about this? Yes, there’s plenty of literature, but not everybody is going to pick up a book.”

With that in mind, it’s even more powerful to watch Cristal Gonzalez, one of the show’s 12 performers, open “Viva La Causa.” An auctioneer attired in red pants and suspenders and sporting pigtail braids, her character is neither defined by her relationships with men nor hiding her femininity, both common for female performers at ETC to do in the past. She’s simply a comic virtuoso, antic in mien, unnerving and cunning with her satire as she exhorts the audience to envision a world in which ETC auctions off its relics.

It’s the kind of performance that not only banishes that possibility, but opens up new ones for the company’s next 50 years.

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

Viva La Causa: Through July 17. $15. El Teatro Campesino, 705 Fourth St., San Juan Bautista. (831) 623-2444. www.elteatrocampesino.com