'The Crossing' 's Natalie Martinez Opens Up About Her Tight-Knit Cuban-American Family: 'I'd Do Anything To Protect Them'

On ABC’s The Crossing, Natalie Martinez plays a genetically modified mother, on a mission to find her daughter as she travels to the present-day United States along with a group of refugees from 180 years in the future.

In real life, however, she says things are far less dramatic.

“I have a good family, I’m very family-oriented,” she says. “I don’t have any kids, but I know that my family and the way we are, I’d do anything to protect them.”

The daughter of Cuban immigrants, Martinez, 33, is a first-generation American, and says her Latin heritage not only informs her close family ties, but manifests itself in every other aspect of her life.

“It’s very much in who I am,” she says. “[It’s] in the food that I cook. And it made me that much sharper and stronger of a person.”

Best known for her work on CSI: New York and El Dorado, Martinez has recently begun cultivating a music career, and has an upcoming single and video set to be released this summer. After that, she plans to make her move to the big screen.

“I have a couple things in the works,” she says. “but [everything] is still in the planning stages.”

For more of Martinez tune into ABC’s The Crossing on Mondays at 10 p.m. (EST)