**5. Atempa in the geography of poverty**

Although embroidering by itself is not associated with forms of life in poverty, in this case the spatial and temporal context of such practice is found within a social, political, economic and symbolic geography that permeates the significance of each element that constitutes it and its relationship with precarity. The geography of poverty defines its territories on a global scale characterized by the impossibility of its inhabitants to make their own decisions on how to direct their lives, as a result for having denied them access to social, economic and political means to exercise the power of choice, according to Amartya Sen [11]. The geography of poverty, from a global scale, generalizes ways of life and the actions to confront their effects. From a local scale, a single lifestyle position is distinguished in its locality in relation to other spatial, social and economic positions relative to other spaces and forms of life.

In Atempa, the way to access economic, social, and political means are extremely limited. Embroidering is one of the few options a person has for attaining economic resources, one that does not demand so much from the body as those that work the fields, or for those that do not require commuting like farm or domestic workers. However, embroidering experiences the same workdays as those in a textile workshop: a systemized production of pieces that will be assembled in a later industrial process. Unlike other towns, despite the time dedicated for sewing, is that there is no technical and/or artistic tradition that accounts for a worldview rich in symbols regarding its past origins.

As described above, these practices respond with shortages to the commercial demands other territories and scales they relate to. It competes with other towns where conditions and means of making undervalue manpower in order to keep better commissions with higher earnings. This prevents the possibility to establish their own prices in the market. Producers are also aware that if the materials become cheaper, so will the quality of the products. Nonetheless, they need to compensate the costs of shipping at the expense of a competitive price for their work. Also, they rival mechanized processes, where production time is significantly reduced by programmed machines that emulate artisanal stitching.

Even though this market product refers to an ancestral, indigenous cosmovision expressed by shapes embodied through the application of needle onto fabric, the commercial intention of this practice has uprooted the communities that originally decorated their own dresses with these techniques. With this I mean that the traditional expression whose origins are in the indigenous communities of San Gabriel Chilac has been displaced to communities of neighboring regions in the Tehuacan valley and throughout the Sierra Negra, where these represented elements in the design have a symbolic, expressive and representative value of an identity that is not their own. In this sense, the value for these communitiesshifts from day-to-day or symbolic use to exchange or trade use. Furthermore, those that are involved in the production process understand that the practice responds to the demands of the market.
