BEATRIZE MARTINEZ STARTED HER LEGAL EDUCATION AT 15.
Beatrize Martinez started her legal education at 15. Not from books or classrooms or professors or papers. Her education came through personal experience. Through living in a domestic violence situation and having to testify against her own father. Through entering the California foster system before she could fathom all the implications - the bad and the ultimate good - it would have on her future. It’s also what started her passion for helping others going through the same experience. “I call them ‘my people.’ Those who grew up in poverty or domestic violence situations,” says Martinez. Growing up in Fresno, Martinez faced one of the toughest decisions of her life. Would she testify against her father, a noncitizen, for battery of a minor, which is a felony and guaranteed deportation? Or would she choose to not talk, which, according to the prosecutor,
would mean she could be
they didn’t see was a family
charged as a runaway and
environment already broken
end up in juvenile jail?
due to poverty. What we needed
“I was 15 at the time and thought
was help, not a life sentence.”
I was really smart. But nothing
Eventually, her help would come
can prepare you for the legal
through education, hard work,
system,” says Martinez.
and building her life as an adult
After testifying against her father, from the age of 15 to 17,
over a thousand miles away from her home and family.
she became one of the voiceless
“My culture is to stay at home
many who enter the world of
and live close to family. But my
foster care. Her life shifted from
family environment wasn’t going
one bad situation to another.
to be conducive to success.”
Nevertheless, even though she found out later she could have opted not to testify against her father, she’s never blamed those in the criminal system working to get her out of her home.
Martinez, who’d been wrestling competitively in school since the seventh grade, googled women’s wrestling in college and found out the team at Oklahoma City University had won the national
“All those people meant well,”
championship three times. It was
she says. “They saw my dad as
a long way from home in a state
a monster who should be in jail
she believed was populated with
for the rest of his life. But what
tumbleweeds and dirt roads,
i call them “my people,” Those who grew up in poverty or domestic violence situations.
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