Missing Latinas, Missing Response

After Reina Carolina Morales Rojas went missing in late November of 2022, her disappearance garnered little attention beyond local media. The 41-year-old woman from El Salvador was last seen leaving a friend’s residence in Somerville, Massachusetts, five miles away from her home, and has not been heard from since.

Reina had immigrated to East Boston earlier that year, hoping to provide more support for her two children back in her home country. After not responding to phone calls, Reina’s sister contacted her landlord, who filed a report with the Boston Police Department (BPD) on November 28th, two days after she was last seen. But BPD would not notify the public about this missing person case until six weeks later, on January 12, 2023, drawing sharp criticism from local leaders and groups.

Reina is one of the thousands of Latinas who go missing every year — a situation made all the more dangerous by police and news media often failing to respond with the urgency needed.

“The first 24 to 48 hours are critical in terms of finding a missing person. People can respond if they did in fact see something. But if time flies, memories get blurred and people forget about things,” said Carol Liebler, a communications professor at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on how the media treat cases of missing women.

When a white woman in her 40s goes missing in Massachusetts, there are at least 23 stories published. For Latinas, or women of color, this is just eight stories, according to a comparative tool developed by the Columbia Journalism Review. The late journalist Gwen Ifill coined the term “missing white woman’s syndrome” to describe the news media’s focus on missing white women and dismissal of Black and Brown women who have disappeared.

This treatment, Liebler writes, is “reflective of the dominant ideology of white supremacy.” This results in news stories that are “often reported within a white racial frame that reaffirms the notion of white superiority. As a result, we privilege the disappearance of a white individual while people of color are othered, marginalized and symbolically annihilated.”

“The FBI says it has not altered its guidelines to account for information gaps about missing Latinas”

Latinas are missing even in the data

A national report in 2023 revealed how the situation for Latinas is made worse by an alarming gap in data collection. PBS News Hour aired this investigation showing that there is no accurate count of how many Latinas are even missing in the United States.

Part of the problem, said Danielle Slakoff, a criminologist at California State University, Sacramento, to PBS is that so many criminal justice databases lump Latino and white individuals together.

In 2022, there were 271,495 missing women, of which 21,759 were reportedly Latinas. However, that number could be misleading not only because of how Latinas are at times misclassified but also because an ethnicity field was filled out in less than 20% of the cases.

The PBS News Hour team explained that Latinas are not quantified in state or federal data because marking ethnicity in a missing persons case is optional and can vary from state to state.

These data gaps at the local level are then submitted to and reflected in federal databases. The FBI says it has not altered its guidelines to account for information gaps about missing Latines.

“The ethnicity field is an optional field in NCIC [National Crime Information Center] and is used to identify if the missing person is Hispanic or Latino,” the FBI explained in a statement. “If the information is made available as part of the missing person report, it should be entered into NCIC.”

By not identifying ethnicity, both local and national agencies are producing large data gaps when it comes to missing persons and how Latinos overall experience the criminal justice system. “It just makes the data really messy,” Liebler said. “It means that we don't have critical information about a missing person that could maybe help.”

In the 2023 report "Exploring Latina/o Representation in Local Criminal Justice Systems," University of California Irvine researchers found that someone’s race or ethnicity is most often simply determined by a police officer.

That ethnicity and race are basically left to the eye of the beholder is compounded by the use of forms and categories that do not reflect the broad spectrum of identities that are packed into “Latino,” from Black Latines, to people from indigenous groups who may reject that European-origin umbrella term.

Adopting other federal data approaches, like the U.S. Census questionnaire, is not necessarily the answer. For example, with the Census announcing that it would combine race and ethnicity into one question, there is concern that Afro Latinas/os could be undercounted. Professor Zaire Dinzey-Flores in an essay for the Black Latinas Know Collective emphasizes that social scientists with an expertise on racial and ethnic identity among Latines must be involved with designing surveys.

This is critical. Without full and accurate measurement of Latine race and ethnicity, policymakers and criminal justice practitioners are unable to determine where there are disparities they should be addressing, say Professor Nancy Rodriguez and co-author Rebecca Tublitz in the UC Irvine report.

The La Raza Database Project offers a snapshot of the invisibility and misclassification of Latines. Through a collaborative volunteer effort, researchers at La Raza identified 90% of 9,000 individuals who had an unknown race or ethnicity in police records. The majority were reclassified as Latino, Roberto Camacho reported in Palabra.

Boston police revise their policy after Reina's disappearance

Since awareness has been raised about her disappearance, Reina’s FBI poster now has her “race,” rather, ethnicity, marked as “Hispanic.”

Albert from Lawyers for Civil Rights noted that the Boston Police Department, updated its policy on Missing Persons Cases (Rule 317) for the first time since 1992.

Last year, the department made changes such as requiring additional internal notifications to improve communication, alerts to more external organizations, and streamlined communication with the NCIC. The new policy also requests a more detailed report, including whether the missing person spoke a language other than English.

BPD also told IDAR/E said they made their missing persons form, “easier to utilize and more effective. We added a checklist of steps to be completed and we added ethnicity,” shared Mariellen Burns, Chief of Communications for the Boston Police Department via email. “This is not mandated by the state, it is, however, something that we wanted to capture related to children and adults who are reported missing.”

Albert pointed out that steps like these could have been critical when Reina disappeared. While BPD says it continues to investigate her disappearance, there have been no further updates or information made available to the public regarding the case.

Whether the implications of the failure to include and report ethnicity and accuracy of a person's identity have prompted any changes in other parts of the nation is not apparent. It’s also unclear whether any leaders, beyond advocates and university researchers, are leading the charge to change this situation.

Local authorities had to be prompted to act

As the founder of the non-profit organization Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts (LUMA), Lucy Pineda's priority is to support the state’s migrant communities. The organization fights for the rights of and justice for the newly arrived in Boston by providing resources and programs. In Massachusetts, approximately 14.4% of the population is Latino, according to the American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2021.

As soon as word spread of Reina’s disappearance among the Latino community in East Boston, and the neighboring area of Somerville, Pineda and others took action. “We started fighting through press releases. We demanded meetings with them [the police] or with our peaceful marches and vigils in front of the police station.”

Community groups like LUMA, and Neighbors United for a Better East Boston (NUBE), pressured the police department for answers. Pineda noted Boston PD’s lack of internal communication, creating confusion for both the investigation and community members.

“One threw the ball to the other. The detectives and the bosses did not agree. When we came and called the detective, the detective gave us information. We called the chief, and he gave us different information,” said Pineda. “They never cared.”

In March of 2023, the Boston City Council adopted a resolution introduced by Councilor Julia Mejía calling for equal treatment of all missing women cases in the City of Boston. The resolution states that, “Police protection should be afforded equally to all residents regardless of race, class, national origin, or gender.”

The rapid response needed when Latines go missing along with full data is an especially urgent need for women fleeing violence, advocates say. Pineda believes that in order to address these cases better in the future, authorities need to be trained to understand the diversity of their communities. Albert also sees a greater need to support immigrant women in East Boston.

“Many of the Latinx women who come to Boston or the United States oftentimes are fleeing violence – violence against women, gendered violence, and then they also experience violence along their trail to the United States,” Albert said. “Then to be here, which is where they think it should be a safe haven, and go missing was really troubling and disturbing to the community.”

Though organizations like LUMA and NUBE are doing what they can to help, they want to see more response from authorities. Whether it’s access to language support at the police station, or walking residents and groups through protocols, they and people of East Boston are demanding the action needed.

“We’re disappointed. There’s no transparency, there’s no justice, there’s no equality. We want authorities that are more responsible in doing their work,” Pineda said.