The daughter of an illegal Mexican immigrant, Marta grew up poor in a working-class suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Her childhood was marked by two summers picking crops in northern Michigan when her father got laid off from work. Today, the hard labor and poor living conditions of migrant workers are never far from her thoughts.

Marta didn't find her true calling until graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, when she took a class in sociology. She saw that the tools of the sociologist—numbers and charts and graphs—told the stories of people's lives. They answer questions like, why are some people rich and others poor? "When you know the stories behind the numbers, then you can find ways to help people," Marta says. "I wanted to make a difference in people's lives by changing the rules and policies that govern them. Becoming a sociologist would give me that opportunity."