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

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Esparza says that he has achieved all of the goals he set for himself in his youth, and is now establishing new goals. He works 12-hour days and hardly gets a day off (a fact his wife isn’t exactly pleased about).

It is somewhat fitting that Esparza’s last leg on his four-week tour across the nation to promote Walkout ended at a retreat center in Malibu, at the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference.

With the buzz of his cell phone, he breaks off our interview for a moment to answer a call. A media CEO wants to have a meeting with him at 4pm. Esparza, who was driven to Malibu by his son, says yes.

Just like that, the only free afternoon that he might have had—one that he badly needs—vanishes.

“It’s always like this,” he says dryly.

Shifting into activist mode one final time before he must go, Esparza elaborates on the significance of the recent marches for immigrant rights across the US, and how they relate to his experience in the late 1960s.

“We have come full circle as a community,” Esparza says. “Now, as in the 1960s, is a time of personal empowerment. We as a community are being attacked in an ignorant way by those who don’t understand our value to the country, or our history as part of the founders of this country.

“They don’t get that they are attacking all Latinos when they attack undocumented workers,” says Esparza, laying out a verbal roadmap for the next generation of Chicano and Latino activists. “The job we now have, simply, is to educate the rest of the country.”