Moctesuma Esparza—Hollywood producer and owner of a budding chain of theaters—is still a crusading activist.

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Esparza’s high school counselor did not help him apply to a university. It was a UCLA student activist who drove out to East LA that ended up recruiting him. And Esparza has not forgotten that counselor’s inability to see him as a young man with potential. It’s an incident he repeats time and again in interviews, as if to affirm that his life-long activism does not stem from some collective angst that he was coerced to buying into.

The angst of Chicano activists in the 1960s and 1970s was not a coerced emotion. It grew naturally in the face of overt and covert attacks on their self-worth that were meted out as a sort of penance for the unpardonable sin of being themselves: American minorities.

“I was like everybody else in my neighborhood and I felt this…pain,” Esparza says. “The pain of being Mexican. There was a deep shame that I had acquired because I was Mexican in heritage. And I wanted so deeply to just be seen as American.”

But what Esparza learned in 1968 was that those who dared to resist, to speak out and be heard as Americans, were often struck down hard.

At Esparza’s high school, as at hundreds of high schools in California during that era, students were regularly paddled, ridiculed, and suspended if they were caught speaking Spanish, which was prohibited in schools. Many high schools with the largest minority populations were also notoriously under-funded and under-staffed. And countless students like Esparza, despite their qualifications for higher education, were dissuaded by teachers from going to a university for no discernable reason other than that they were Chicanos, Blacks or poor.

Esparza saw these things and fought back. But he admits that he wasn’t born a fighter. In elementary school, bullies picked on him constantly, beating him up once a week. That was until an African-American teacher taught him how to fight.

“He told me, ‘Look, until you start fighting back, they’re not going to respect you and they’re not going to leave you alone,’” Esparza remembers.

When he reached high school, Esparza applied that strategy as a means to address the injustices he saw around him.

He became “Mocte” the activist, the rabble-rouser, the radical. He helped found the Brown Berets—modeled partially on the Black Panthers—and later the United Mexican American Students, which evolved into MEChA, an organization that still thrives on high school and college campuses across the US today.

Even after Esparza enrolled at UCLA to study film, he hung around in his old neighborhood. He’d organize high school students, encourage them to apply to the university, and hold strategy sessions with other Chicano activist peers.

It was in this setting—in East LA, March, 1968—during a moment in time when profound social change seemed like a viable possibility to millions of people in this country and around the world, that Esparza was catapulted into the limelight for the first time.

As a freshman at UCLA, Esparza became one of the core organizers for the largest high school student walkouts in California history (until two weeks ago, that is).

In March 1968, students from five Los Angeles high schools populated with mostly Chicano students walked out of classes for two weeks to protest substandard conditions. These walkouts happened a few years after the Watts Riots—at a time when the city was racially charged and the fear of violent police reprisals were acute. Walkout tells the story through the eyes of the students themselves. The movie details the fears they faced in defying their parents, teachers and police. But it also revels in the adrenaline rush of successfully pulling off the walkouts and having the school board begin to address student demands.

Walkout is designed to be historically accurate and emotional. One of the film’s most powerful moments comes from actual footage of the walkouts and of Los Angeles Police Department officers beating students at their schools—footage that never made it to the evening news in 1968 and was only unearthed a few years ago.

The 1968 walkouts proved to be a watershed in Chicano and Latino history. Not only did they inspire other walkouts and increased activism in non-Mexican-American neighborhoods, but they were also the precursors to a more intense level of political activity in urban Latino communities in the Southwest for years to come.

In a real sense, the 1968 walkouts helped set the stage for the forging of a new status and a fresh identity for Chicanos—and later Latinos—in American society.

This struggle was not without its risks. A few weeks after the 1968 walkouts, Esparza was plucked off a picket line protesting police brutality and arrested. He was later indicted by a Grand Jury in Los Angeles, along with 12 others. The young Chicano activists, who became known as the East LA 13, were charged with conspiring to commit a misdemeanor—a felony charge—immediately after the high school student walkouts.

Esparza, the nerdy overachiever, was facing life in prison.

The film Walkout ends with Esparza and the 12 others being arrested. What didn’t make it into the film was his relationship with Oscar Zeta Acosta, gonzo attorney and close friend of author Hunter S. Thompson.

Acosta, along with a string of ACLU lawyers and others, represented the East LA 13 in court and eventually helped get their indictment thrown out.

“He was a character in earlier drafts of the film,” Esparza says. “But he was such a bigger-than-life character that we had to end the story before we get to him.”

Esparza says he had wanted to make a film about the walkouts for decades, but that things started to fall into place only during the last five years. Finally, three weeks ago, his dream came to fruition: HBO premiered Walkout on March 18.

Esparza believes the film has been blessed with uncanny timing; he does not believe that it is responsible for inspiring the recent nationwide Latino high school student walkouts aimed against anti-immigrant legislation now being mulled over by Congress.

“I’d be happy to take the credit,” Esparza says. “But students have been walking out for years on their own.”

Notwithstanding such humble talk, an increasing number of folk, including Walkout director Edward James Olmos, believe that the film is at least partly responsible for the recent walkouts, whose repercussions have been keenly felt in the halls of Congress.

“I see our film as giving students the idea to band together and make a statement,” Olmos told the Orange County Register two weeks ago. “Media is as influential as anything I’ve ever seen.”

That media is influential is something that Esparza believes with his whole heart. It is the belief that underlies his role as an activist filmmaker and as a businessman.

Since graduating from UCLA film school with a masters of arts degree, Esparza has produced more than 30 films, including The Milagro Beanfield War, Selena and Gods and Generals.

Perhaps more than any single man or woman, Esparza has pushed Hollywood studios to begin seeing this nation’s ballooning Latino population as a market that can’t be ignored. As a behind-the-scenes player, he’s helped put brown faces on film and TV, giving dozens of Latino actors and writers their chance to get their foot in the door.

Of all of the films he’s produced, Esparza says that Walkout is the most important project. With his résumé, that’s saying a lot. But it’s also easy to see why he believes it—especially when witnessing scenes on the news that look like scenes from the movie.