"[9] She is a co-founder of Refusing to Forget, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching and raising public awareness of current and past racial violence in Texas.

[2][10] Her first book The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas was published by Harvard University Press in 2018 and has received numerous awards and positive reviews in academic journals.

[11][12][13][14] Commenting on her book she stated her goal was attempting “to recover history that’s been forgotten or disavowed and make it public.

The book continues with a history of the efforts by José Tomás Canales in 1919 to bring criminal charges against several Texas Rangers for their involvement in terrorizing and murdering Mexican Americans and the House-Senate committee hearings that investigated the murders and violence perpetrated by the Texas Rangers in the borderlands.

[17][2] In 2019, Martinez gave testimony in Congress during Judiciary Committee hearings on the "Oversight of the Trump Administration’s Border Policies and the Relationship Between Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and Domestic Terrorism".