Two Sundays ago, Moctesuma Esparza arrived at LAX at 1am after a whirlwind weekend promoting the new HBO film Walkout, which he produced and Edward James Olmos directed. It may have been coincidental that during the same weekend, thousands of Latino and Latina students all over the country were participating in exactly the kind of walkout depicted in the film—a dramatic story drawn from real events in 1968, in which Esparza himself participated.

On this trip, Esparza had already been to Houston and Washington, DC. He’s been crisscrossing the nation like this for four weeks—talking to this group, delivering speeches to that group.

Esparza had every excuse in the world to skip out on the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference when he desperately needed some rest. But he didn’t.

It’s about 10am and Esparza, with only a few of hours of sleep in the last three days, walks before the crowd of about 40 high school students. He was exactly like them once. They are mostly honor students and high-achievers, and they have spent three days learning about Chicano history, activism and ways to tackle existing social ills.

Esparza takes a deep breath and delivers a speech that is brief but intense. He challenges the students to take responsibility for the future of their country.

“You’ve all heard statistics that we’re 14 percent of the country,” Esparza tells the transfixed young faces. “But Latinos and other people of color are in fact a majority for people under 30. Whether or not this country keeps the promise of the American dream is going to depend largely on whether or not we are prepared to accept the responsibility of being a majority.”

The kids give him a standing ovation and present him with a gift. Then Esparza walks out of the hall for a few minutes and his body shrinks back down. He’s visibly exhausted and in pain.

“I have this eye condition that’s been getting worse,” Esparza says slowly as he looks for a shady spot. “Any bright light makes me feel like a nail is being hammered into my eye.”

Esparza doesn’t go home. He sticks around to listen to the students speak at their final meeting—a process that takes nearly two hours. Their energy is contagious. And Esparza, who as a teenager went through the same three-day conference, begins to revive. For him, this is what his whole life has been about.

“These kids are an inspiration to me because I know they’ve had an experience that’s changed their lives,” Esparza says after the students have funneled elsewhere to eat lunch together. “I know that if there was any doubt about them going to college and graduating, that vanished this weekend.”

By the time he was in high school, Moctesuma Esparza was already a sensation of sorts. “Mocte,” as his friends called him, was serious, acutely self-confident (some say full of himself) and profoundly idealistic. He was a high-achieving honor student, a cadet lieutenant colonel with his school’s ROTC, and valedictorian. He was an active member of the Governor’s Youth Advisory Council and a founder of a slew of other organizations, some of which still exist to this day.

“I was the president of every single club on the campus,” Esparza says of himself as a teenager. “I was as nerdy as you can get.”

Esparza also happened to be a Chicano. He was born in Los Angeles but his ancestry is Mexican. He says he lived in a modest home with plastic windows that stared straight out at a public housing project in East LA, already a heavily Mexican-American enclave by the 1960s.

Esparza discovered early that some people couldn’t see past his background. He realized that these people, no matter how close they got to him, couldn’t see the clean-cut, smart student with a lot of potential.

Esparza’s high school counselor was one of those people.

“I remember my counselor saying that I ought to be grateful because if I had gone to a school in West LA, they would have made me work harder,” recalls Esparza, now 57. “I didn’t think that was something to be grateful for.”

Today, Esparza is the owner of Maya Cinemas in Salinas, an award-winning Hollywood producer, and one of the most influential Latino activist/entrepreneurs to emerge from the Chicano movement of the 1960s. He is on the board of over a dozen public service organizations and is on a first-name basis with the most powerful Latino politicians and power brokers in the country. Yet Esparza remains a activist at heart—his body of work an extension of his militant youth, when he helped spark the first high school walkouts that anyone had ever seen.