Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is part of the Partridge and Chavez families that owned and worked the land in Chavez Ravine. She was an eager student of oral histories about her indigenous family stemming from early Cahuilla times. She taught for 38 years at the elementary and middle school levels in San Francisco and Los Angeles and recently retired from the Teacher Education Department at the University of San Francisco. She has written teacher's guides for the books and movies "500 Years of Chicano History," and "The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Struggle." Ms. Drummond's lifelong activism includes the 1970s "Los Siete de la Raza" civil rights case, affordable housing on a community level, and lifelong activism on the part of students' rights and needs.