This chapter focuses on the impact of trade on the functioning of the economy of favor. It argues that the growing importance of conspicuous consumption in New Spain and the introduction of new venal practices raised questions about the assessment process that, according to many, was the key to a just distributive process. In the context of these discussions surrounding such impact, transpacific trade was thematized as well. After discussing critical reflections about the ways in which consumption and trade affected ideas of worthiness, the chapter returns to Rodrigo de Vivero’s Abisos to analyze his critique of the growing influence of commerce on New Spanish society and distributive processes in the Spanish empire. Subsequently, it examines the efforts of Mexico City’s cabildo to fashion a particular image of a deserving community while negotiating with the Crown over financial contributions to the Armada de Barlovento. By juxtaposing Vivero’s reflections with those of Mexico City’s cabildo, the chapter seeks once more to exhibit how calls for isolationism or economic integration were each, in their discrete way, crucial to the distributive struggles within the viceroyalty.

New Spain’s integration into the Pacific Basin played an important role in the viceroyalty’s political and social history. Interactions between the two become visible in descriptions of Spain’s distributive struggles. The conclusion argues that diverging notions of a deserving self and undeserving other produced by such disputes were strategic responses to a changing world in which the increasing mobility of people and goods created both opportunities and fierce competition over limited benefits and resources. Consideration of the ways in which these men and women engaged with the logic of assessment has resulted in a more variegated understanding of their views of the world, as well as their places within it, that acknowledges not only individual agendas but their divergent relationships to collectives as well. While Pacific and transpacific exchanges continued to have an impact on distributive struggles after 1640, the importance of the hierarchy of beneméritos, as it developed in the wake of the diminished conquest, once again altered discussions about worthiness and unworthiness and the ways in which people identified themselves and others.

With the expansion of Spanish activities into the Pacific Basin, New Spain increasingly became a global point of intersection for imperial, commercial, and religious networks. The mobility of persons and goods affected external perceptions of New Spain’s place in a globalizing world, as well as its residents’ self-perception. The Introduction observes that these transformations have typically been studied through the lens of a historiographic narrative about creolization. After reviewing debates about the use of the creole paradigm for the study of Spanish identities in the Indies, the chapter introduces the notion of the deserving self, which had emerged in the context of late medieval struggles over the distribution of royal favor, as an alternative framework for studying the interrelationship between movement and processes of identity-making and identification at this crossroad of transoceanic networks. Finally, it explains the link between various conceptualizations of a deserving self and the stories people recounted about the world and the desirability of global integration.