**Abstract**

Embroidery making is one of the practices carried out in the indigenous town of Atempa, Coyomeapan, in the Sierra Negra mountain range of the state of Puebla. The temporal, physical, social, and geographic milieu that it occupies in people's lives leads us to consider it as an expression that sheds light on the community's form of life. This study analyzes the intersections among the scaled levels of capital that configure embroidery making with other activities and places. The case, from the theoretical lens of lifestyles and unequal development, raises a series of questions over the interaction of these practices and places, which constitute, in the collective imagination, the precarious and vulnerable lives in this town. In this sense, this article posits that the practice of embroidery in Atempa reveals the way in which this town connects to the world via the different levels of domination-subordination produced by its commercial, social and spatial relations, and, among other factors, how it shapes their ways of life in poverty. This perspective allows the studying of its practices and contexts as part of the phenomenon of poverty from a local level, without disassociating it from its global conditioning.

**Keywords:** embroidery, lifestyles, unequal development, practices, poverty, Mexico, space, scale, place
