Merchants who engaged in long-distance trade to obtain high-value luxury goods occupied a special place in prehispanic society. Sahagún in the preceding epigraph identifies the specialized long-distance merchant as an oztomecatl or vanguard merchant. Contemporary scholars have generally referred to long-distance merchants as pochteca because it is the most frequently used term found in the literature. Determining which term to use for long-distance merchants appears to have been situational. Based on Sahagún's Tlatelolco informants, pochteca was a general term that referred to all types of professional merchants while oztomeca referred specifically to specialized, long-distance merchants. Durán (1994) and other sources regularly used the term pochteca when the context was clear that they were referring to merchants in distant lands. Care needs to be exercised when reading the sources since modern scholars often uncritically associate all discussions of the pochteca with specialized long-distance traders instead of recognizing that the term embraced an array of retail tradesmen and merchandisers operating at many different geographical scales.

Three features mark the unique activities of all pochteca vanguard merchants. First, like retailers discussed in Chapter 6, they were commercial specialists who engaged in commerce on a full-time basis. While some individuals may also have had lands to support their families, the bulk of their income came from their individual entrepreneurial endeavors. Second, the risks of long-distance travel required cooperation between collaborating merchants. The result was that most vanguard merchants resided in internally stratified corporate communities that provided mutual assistance to its members. Third and finally, merchants who engaged in long-distance trade focused on the procurement of wealth goods such as jade, feathers, and richly adorned textiles. These items were important insignias of rank and status within society and a tremendous source of wealth for the merchants who trafficked in them.