Her landmark book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico [1] garnered significant academic recognition.
[2][3][4][5] Martínez was born in northern Mexico in 1966 and moved with her family to Chicago in the 1970s.
While teaching at USC, she inaugurated the Colonial Latin America seminar at the USC-Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute.
She gave large number of academic presentations, one of which at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was videotaped in May 2004.
[6] Martínez was lesbian and was the partner of academic Sarah Gualtieri for many years.