Rachael Ochoa-Cervera, 74, sees something she wants to do and makes it happen. She’s been that way since she was a teen growing up in Boyle Heights in the 1960s. She attended Theodore Roosevelt High School, where she excelled in academics, was head cheerleader, and spoke up against social injustices.
“My mother always told me, ‘Rachael, you’re gonna get in trouble. Just do what you’re told.’ I guess somehow I just had this attitude that if I felt something wasn’t fair, I would protest it,” Ochoa-Cervera said.
She didn’t heed her mother’s advice and continued to be politically active. After graduating from Roosevelt in 1967, she returned to the school to assist with the 1968 walkouts, a massive protest that resulted in thousands of students walking out of four Eastside high schools. Law enforcement showed up and attempted to force students to return to class but the crowds refused to heed their demands.
Ochoa-Cervera’s involvement in the movement began in 1963 when she attended the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference at Camp Hess Kramer in Malibu. The conference gathered Mexican-American high schoolers from Southern California for leadership training. It was there she met Victoria “Vickie” Castro, a 1963 Roosevelt graduate who attended the conference the year before. Castro would go on to become a teacher, member of the Los Angeles School Board, and principal of Hollenbeck Elementary School.
At Camp Hess, Kramer, Castro, and Ochoa learned other Latino students throughout Southern California were experiencing discrimination as minorities. “Chicanos and Latinos were the majority [in Boyle Heights], but I had no concept of what a minority was even though I had heard the term,” Castro said.
Hearing about other students’ experiences made Castro and Ochoa-Cervera reflect on their time at Roosevelt. The quality of education at Roosevelt in the 1960s yielded mixed results. The student population was increasingly Latino, while the faculty and administration remained largely white. Students were ranked academically based on a tracking system, and students who didn’t perform well were delegated to remedial classes.
“As long as you were like a goodie-two shoes and always said, ‘Yes ma’am, yes, sir,’ [you were treated well], and I was naive to that until I went to Camp Hess Kramer. So, you know, you come back with a different kind of awareness,” Ochoa-Cervera said. “There was a college prep group, there was a medium group, a low group, and they would never tell us this.”
In the years that followed, Castro and Ochoa-Cervera would work together alongside other Eastside high school students. The group of teenagers and young adults formed the Young Citizens for Community Action in 1966, and Castro was elected president while Ochoa-Cervera was elected secretary.
YCCA would later change its name to Young Chicanos for Community Action before permanently becoming the Brown Berets under David Sanchez’s leadership. “We sort of settled, after a lot of discussion, on two issues that we all were facing— we want to improve our schools and then also take on police brutality,” Castro said.
Ochoa-Cervera was the fifth of twelve children and spent her adolescence being looked after by her older and younger brothers. She knew she was different from her siblings at a young age, and her brothers jokingly reminded her of that often. “I don’t think my brothers and sisters understood the real Rachael because even though I had good grades, I was always very adventurous and willing to take a risk, willing to speak my mind,” Ochoa-Cervera said.
She said her older brother, Richard, was the sibling who understood her the best.
“He would have been right there with me at the walkouts, whereas my other brothers and sisters thought I was crazy doing all this [activist] stuff,” Ochoa-Cervera said. “I give a lot of homage to him because he taught me to be aggressive and assertive.”
In 1960, Richard was stabbed and killed in the neighborhood; he was 15. His death prompted their mother, Florence Estrada-Ochoa, to become more civically engaged in Boyle Heights. She attended protests and community meetings, speaking out against crime on the Eastside.
Ochoa-Cervera was influenced by her mother’s response to her brother’s death, and she carried that spirit of civic engagement with her to Belvedere Middle School and later to Roosevelt.
She learned to balance her organizing, academic, and cheerleading responsibilities but also made time to check in on her younger siblings. Her younger brother Ruben “Buggs” Ochoa, 70, credits his sister with making sure he did all his homework despite him having more interest in painting, lowriders, and cruising with friends.
“What excited me about being a painter was the first time I saw this candy apple red 1959 Pontiac,” Ochoa said. She was very supportive of it, and she knew it kept me busy because I would take extra courses, night classes for [learning to work on] body and fender and all that.”
Ochoa, who also attended Roosevelt, grew up to be a famous car painter, hosting low-rider shows in the city. He says he owes some of his success to his sister’s lesson: “Keep busy, and you’re not going to get in trouble,” Ochoa said.
Ochoa-Cervera, however, felt the need to do something more if they wanted to draw attention to their conditions at Roosevelt.
Castro, Ochoa-Cervera, and their friends spent two years, from 1966 to 1968, at La Piranha Coffee House, a “cafe” in East L.A., planning the walkouts. “We started meeting there, and community leaders would come to help us with our issues and formulate ideas. In about 1966 or ‘67, Sal Castro spoke to us, and that’s when I first met him,” Castro said.
Sal Castro, of no relation to Vickie Castro, was a teacher at Lincoln High School who spoke out against the unequal treatment of non-white students at four Eastside schools: Roosevelt High, Lincoln High, James A. Garfield High, and Woodrow Wilson Senior High. He went on to become an education advocate and was honored by President Bill Clinton at a ceremony in 1996.
“We had already been meeting with school administrators but it didn’t mean anything, so he planted the seed for us to have a mass demonstration to make the demands that we had compiled,” Vickie Castro said.
In March of 1968, Castro and Ochoa-Cervera returned to Roosevelt High School to participate in the walkouts they had spent the past couple of years organizing. Ochoa-Cervera spent a lot of time at the walkouts driving students to safety and keeping things organized.
Castro remembers Ochoa-Cervera being helpful every step of the way throughout the process. “She was very vocal and articulate. She was always a doer and always a pláticona [talker]; it has not changed,” Castro said.
Afterward, Ochoa-Cervera continued to attend LACC and then transferred to Cal State LA in 1970. She graduated in 1973 with her Bachelor’s in Mexican-American Studies. That same year, she obtained her teaching credentials from Claremont Graduate University and taught at schools in Monterey Park and El Monte before retiring in 2022.
“The whole 40 years that I was [teaching] in elementary, I never mentioned it [the walkouts]. No one ever asked me, and I never mentioned it because I just knew that when I was young, I kind of got reprimanded [for my involvement],” Ochoa-Cervera said.
Ochoa-Cervera credits Dr. Dolores Delgado Bernal, the former chair of Cal State LA’s Department of Chicana (o) Studies, for bringing together the women of the walkouts. “We’re all named in her dissertation in 1995 celebrating that 25th anniversary and she got us together, then 25 years later in 2018 at Cal State LA,” she said.
Ochoa-Cervera says the lasting legacy of the walkouts is that future Roosevelt students can have more success without having to protest. “Some of them who were walkout students at that time possibly had more opportunities [at the school]. So it did work out some things and opened the eyes of people,” she said.
