How Cástulo de la Rocha Built an Affordable Health Care Empire

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 Federall...