Legacy femicide isn’t abstract – it’s etched into headlines that shape public memory. “How Two Smart, Beautiful College Students Wound Up Dead From an Overdose,” read a 2005 New York Magazine piece on Mellie Carballo and Maria Pesantez. They were bright, ambitious Latinas who died just steps from my childhood apartment at the Lillian Wald Houses.

At their age, I was also at NYU, learning the city’s after-hours curriculum: how to survive, how to belong, how to reappear in a place that rarely makes space for us. I, too, experimented with substances that could have killed me. As a former educator at Hunter and now at Mellie and Maria’s alma mater NYU, I often wonder what futures they were denied. I began my life where theirs ended, a cruel symmetry that still haunts me. But this story isn’t just personal.

In America, mourning is political – and selective. Mellie and Maria’s deaths weren’t isolated tragedies but indictments of a system that erases Latinas through neglect and condemnation. Even after the coroner ruled their overdoses “accidental,” the classification misled, implying a fluke.

Headlines like “Did Bad Heroin Kill Two Coeds?” framed them as reckless girls chasing danger with older men, not casualties of a city that offered escape routes laced with risk. They simply had “lost their way,” and the media repackaged their death into a moral parable about danger, deviance, and disposability.

Some tragedies become public memorials, while the media too often portrays Latina lives as expendable. We’re blamed for poor choices instead of systemic neglect. Since 1999, accidental overdose deaths among Latinx people have quadrupled, with rates among Latinas rising sharply. This isn’t just a public health crisis – it’s legacy femicide: a pattern where institutional failure and media erasure render women’s suffering and deaths invisible. This makes our reality seem inevitable, rather than preventable.

The same conditions that made Mellie and Maria vulnerable now cling to the legacy of 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. Reported missing multiple times and allegedly linked to singer D4vd, an adult, Celeste was found discarded – her decomposed body in the trunk of his abandoned Tesla. Media coverage was evasive, riddled with speculation, and laden with rumors and judgment. Her death was ruled a homicide, yet the cause remains “deferred,” pending toxicology.

News outlets fixated on the 11 police visits to Celeste’s home but ignored the deeper question: how did she slip through the cracks despite clear signs of child endangerment? Terms like accidental and deferred obscure culpability, framing tragedy as unavoidable.

Like they did with Mellie and Maria, mainstream media cast Celeste as a lesson in consequences – branding her through headlines that fixated on “fake IDs” and police records while ignoring the systems that failed to protect her. Reporters chose quotes from ex-boyfriends to shift blame from institutional neglect to personal dysfunction, reinforcing the harmful trope that Latina girls are complicit in their own demise. Legacy femicide thrives on these narratives, turning Latina lives into a clickable spectacle where erasure masquerades as coverage and sensationalism eclipses truth.

In 2004, Gwen Ifill named the pattern: Missing White Woman Syndrome, where the media fixates on white women’s disappearances while women of color vanish unnoticed or are buried in bureaucratic limbo. This pattern exposes a racialized hierarchy of attention.

The reflex runs deep – we still search for Amelia Earhart, while Latina girls die and disappear without reckoning. A moral economy mourns Charlie Kirk as a national loss while erasing Mellie, Maria, and Celeste, revealing whose lives are grieved and whose are quietly discarded. This is how legacy femicide operates: not only through the violence that ends their lives, but through narratives that obscure their humanity, flattening their stories into scandal.

For Latinas, dislocation can be deadly. Without knowing a place’s rhythms, you can’t read its codes: who to trust, what to avoid, which spaces are safe. Unlike “wrong place, wrong time,” which often absolves white victims, Latinas rarely receive that grace. Their deaths are portrayed not as misfortunes but as consequences of poor judgment, reinforcing the myth that they alone are responsible for their safety and survival.

The news industry doesn’t just ignore Latina deaths – it rewrites them. It turns suffering into spectacle, and loss into moral parable. As Latina identity becomes increasingly criminalized and surveilled, naming legacy femicide offers a way for us to expose these injustices. The narratives around these deaths are not random, but rooted in colonial systems that decide who gets lamented and who fades without notice.

Legacy femicide lives in the stories we tell and those we silence. Latina women remain trapped in colonial binaries: virgin or whore, saint or traitor. Consider the enduring myth of La Malinche, coded as hypersexual, condemned as a traitor, and weaponized to justify violence against women deemed too independent or knowing. Yet Malinche was just a young Indigenous girl, caught in the crosshairs of conquest, abused and erased. Her legacy reverberates through everyday insults like ¡Chinga tu madre! – a reminder that stories can wound, and still do. Her narrative reveals how storytelling becomes a tool of discipline, still used to control and diminish Latinas.

Latinas navigate a world where danger often wears the mask of freedom. Honoring Mellie, Maria, and Celeste means rewriting the stories that flattened them, transforming grief into defiance. Legacy femicide thrives in silence and spectacle, and the media manufactures it, erasing our truths or distorting them for profit. It feeds on forgotten names and manipulated narratives.

To break that cycle, we must choose dignity over disappearance and truth over erasure. We must become the narrators of our own lives, writing, filming, archiving, and amplifying stories that center our voices, our joy, and our grief. Every word matters: they can deepen the wound or begin to heal it.

Let’s flood the silence with truth, disrupt the spectacle, and build a record that demands to be heard. Tell it loud. Tell it raw. Tell it like only we can.