# Afro-Mexican communities today: Indices of underdevelopment and exclusion  
Afro-Mexican communities lack many basic amenities and facilities. Even a short visit to the many small African-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica reveals the level of neglect encountered by the people. Essential services such as health centres and hospitals lack adequate medication, equipment and medical personnel. The education system is woefully inadequate as schools are not properly staffed or equipped. It could be said that not very much has been done to improve the impoverished conditions in which Afro-Mexicans have  
lived since the 1950s, when Aguirre Beltrán wrote about the absence of medical facilities and schools in the region.  
Since the 1980s, the activism of Father Glyn Jemmott Nelson and a few other members of the society has resulted in some improvements, but the conditions remain unacceptable, with many communities still having no access to drinking water, paved roads or safe and adequate housing. Perhaps the most deplorable aspect of their living conditions is housing. The majority of houses are constructed from fragile and improvised materials available in the immediate natural surroundings, mainly wood, sticks, mud, palapa thatch and palm leaves. Most are dilapidated, unmistakably unsafe and vulnerable in an area subject to frequent hurricanes. This is even more disconcerting when issues of human dignity and comfort are considered.  
One member of the African-Mexican community, very conscious of being a black person belonging to a distinctive ethnic group within Mexico, maintains that there have been no attempts at the government level to assist in improving the living conditions of African-Mexicans:  
Although there are Government programmes that could satisfy these housing needs, they are not used to resolve the problem as a consequence of bureaucratic, political and economic red tape.
(Sergio Peñaloza, unpublished presentation, 2016, Kingston, Jamaica). ${ }^{1}$