Monica Muñoz Martinez is an award-winning author, educator, public historian, and active participant in developing solutions that address racial injustice. A national authority on the history of race, her research specializes in histories of racial violence, policing on the US-Mexico border, Latinx history, women and gender studies, public humanities, digital humanities, and restorative justice.

Her first book "The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas" (Harvard University Press, Sept 2018) is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. She is currently at work on Mapping Violence a digital research project that recovers histories of racial violence in Texas between 1900 and 1930.

Martinez is a founding member of the non-profit organization Refusing to Forget that calls for public commemorations of anti-Mexican violence in Texas. The team developed an award-winning exhibit for the Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2016 that marked the first time a state cultural institution acknowledged state responsibility for this period of racial terror in the twentieth century. Martinez also helped secure four state historical markers along the US-Mexico border.