When Cástulo de la Rocha arrived at the East LA Barrio Free Clinic in 1977, he had just moved back from Berkeley, where he’d gone to law school. “I pulled up in my old beat-up Volkswagen. I had long hair for sure, holes in my pants and things like that. So a very typical hippie,” he recalls. At the clinic, started by activists to provide free health care in Spanish to the Latino community, “I saw long lines of people waiting to get a number—a ticket early in the morning, so that they may see a volunteer physician at 4:30, 5:00 in the afternoon,” he says. “It could have been my mother, could have been my sisters. It could have been one of my family members.”
De la Rocha, who was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and immigrated to East LA when he was 10 years old, was just a few years out of college and there to be the group’s first employee. Whether he’d still have a job after the first three months depended on whether he, as executive director, could drum up funding. For the next five decades, that’s what he did, as the small clinic expanded into what is now known as AltaMed Health Services, a major provider of health care in southern California and the nation’s largest nonprofit Federally Qualified Health Center. Today, de la Rocha is CEO and president, and he estimates that AltaMed employs about 10,000 people and serves 700,000 patients over about 2 million visits annually.
Throughout his time at AltaMed, he has remained inspired by the energy and vision of the clinic’s founders and board members, who were young activists in their early 20s passionate about social justice. “They said we can make a difference,” he says. “There was a need for health care, and as long as we kept our doors open, continued to support the community, people kept coming. Here we are today. AltaMed is a very different organization, but we’ve never forgotten our roots and our commitment to the community.”
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