Yucatán has 68 municipalities with a high concentration of indigenous people, with at least 60 percent of them living in poverty. This ranks it third nationally, after Oaxaca with 444 municipalities and Puebla with 109, according to the study “Poverty and Indigenous Population in Mexico” by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval).
This means that Yucatán accounts for 7.7 percent of the country’s population living in this situation, while Oaxaca has 49.9 percent and Puebla 12.3 percent.
Among the other two states on the Iberian Peninsula, Campeche is in 13th place with five municipalities, and Quintana Roo also has the same number of municipalities, although the national proportion is 0.56 percent for each.
Coneval (National Council of Indigenous Peoples) indicates that 22 of the country’s 32 states contain 889 municipalities where a high concentration of Indigenous people and poverty converge.
These municipalities are the intersection of two fundamental elements of inequality in Mexico: ethnicity and poverty, which, for the most part, are linked to a third element: rurality.
Prioritizing resources and efforts in these areas would not only improve the living conditions of the most disadvantaged populations but could also have a positive impact on regional and national development, the agency recommends.
Indigenous people are considered to be “all those who are part of an indigenous household, where the head of the household, their spouse, and/or one of their ancestors (mother or father, stepmother or stepfather, grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, parent-in-law) declared themselves to be speakers of an indigenous language.”
A person is in a situation of poverty when they have at least one social deficiency: they lack access to at least one of the rights to education, health, social security, housing, and food, and their income is less than the value of the basic monthly food basket.
As of 2020, just over 26 million people were Indigenous, either because they spoke an indigenous language, belonged to an Indigenous household, or identified themselves as such.
Of these, 4.3 million people live in municipalities where more than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.
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