**1. Introduction**

*They bring it over from Chilac. A lady comes and distributes it among us. All the women know how to embroider; no other way. There is not any work here like in Tehuacan… They pay us little… \$20 to \$25 pesos, depending on what we are stitching.*  *They make anything from dresses to blouses that they resell in Cancun or Matamoros1 . They come with the design already made. We just stitch the pattern. We put up our own string and material. We do two a week, because we each have our own chores to do. My aunts taught me. My mother taught me. We grew up with it because there aren't any jobs. We learned very young. (A. and L. Campos, personal conversation, 14 of February 2020).*

On the various occasions that I visited the Campos2 family in Atempa, Coyomeapan, Puebla, I found a similar scene: three women weaving, sitting in their patio, under the shade of the extending roofs over stone floors. Veronica, Leticia and Antonia (grandmother, daughter and granddaughter) belong to different generations of women from the same family that, among their diverse activities, are also embroiderers. Sitting next to each other, heads down, their gaze focused on the next stitch to color the petals of a flower. The three women barely say anything and only look up to put a new string through the needle. They stitch in a hurry, as they are committed to deliver a shipment with multiple pieces the following day. This performance is replicated in most of the houses in this community of 205 inhabitants [1], since embroidery making is a primary source of income for its residents, in addition to their work in the fields, their trade of products derived from agriculture and livestock, and their paid domestic work.

Atempa is one of forty-two towns in the municipality of Coyomeapan. It is situated in a depression among various hills in the heart of Puebla's Sierra Negra mountain range. Its denizens are indigenous, Nahuatl-speaking first, Spanish-speaking second. The temporal, physical, social, and geographic space that embroidery occupies in these people's lives in Atempa makes me consider how an expression can shed light on their form of life [2]. The field of self-expression within embroidery alludes to an area of content revealing how this practice implicates diverse precepts of precarity, vulnerability, and precarious work dynamics operating from unequal relations in scaled spatial and social capital.

The conditions of Precarity and Marginalization of this town have been studied by academia and institutions of social development, interpreting its findings from public policy or by way of diverse economic variables within a wider geography: regional or municipal, in the best of cases. Of these investigations, we know that the municipality of Coyomeapan, in which the town of Atempa is located, is one of the rural indigenous territories with the most extreme poverty in the state of Puebla [3]. Nevertheless, the majority of these findings had been conducted without considering the local, social and material transformations in concomitance and synchronicity with its actors' practice, who are the protagonists in the phenomena of this investigation. Analyzing the case from this perspective raises questions over the contradictions, the particularities and conditionings that arise among microgeographies when expressing specific lifestyles by these practices [2].

<sup>1</sup> Tehuacan is the second most important populated commercial hub in the state of Puebla, after its state capital. It is situated 120 minutes from Coyomeapan, a hillside municipality bordering the state of Oaxaca, and 30 minutes from the peri-urban municipality of San Gabriel Chilac. Cancun is a tourist hub well known for its domestic and foreign vacationers located in the state of Quintana Roo. Matamoros, Tamaulipas, is located on the border with the United States, and is an important commercial cross-border city.

<sup>2</sup> The names of the participants have been changed to protect their identity for the sake of this investigation.

*A Hundred Stitches Make a Canvas: How the Practice of Embroidery Relates to Forms of Life… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105162*

**Figure 1.** *Embroidery in action.*

In this text, by analyzing the testimonies of embroiderers in Atempa, compiled in a series of interviews and data obtained by way of participatory observation, the ways in which this town connects with other territories through differing levels of domination-subordination in its commercial, social, and spatial relations are revealed. This, among other phenomena, produces ways of life whose constitutive elements are defined by the poverty registry. Not only does this just concern the practice of embroidery, which we can recognize among the dynamics of accumulation, but also the meaning behind its making. A way of its making is defined by time and particular durations; by constitutive spaces through its act of social relations; by specific actors that implement certain techniques, that make available their body, the capacity and their knowledge to complete certain tasks. It is also defined by utilities and objects such as tools and supports, and scenographic objects that bear witness to the acts, whose contribution resides in its capacity to set the stage and contextualize. As a result, the work of textualizing is complicated. Putting into words what appears both simultaneously and on its own rhythm makes impossible the endeavor to deliver the intersubjective experience as it is perceived and expressed by its practitioners ([4], pp. 101–130).

The following lines present, firstly, the context of the investigation in empirical terms, with references of these connections between the concrete practice and other practices, and how their implications are scaled up and down from the local level. In the next segment, spaces for this practice, its materiality and correlation with its capacity to reproduce actions that make embroidering possible are analyzed. Lastly, the connection between these scaled spaces and the meaning of conformity in poverty lifestyles is discussed (**Figure 1**).
