This two-part roundtable examines the possibilities that emerge for writing different histories of Blackness when scholars engage with early Latin American archives. It reflects on whether these archives make visible other modalities through which people of African descent created social and political worlds. A rich scholarship on the early modern period has shown that people of African descent were not outsiders, but rather, integral members of early Latin American societies. They litigated inside courts of law, formed families that they registered inside the Church, led military defenses, built infrastructure, sustained urban and rural economies, created novel healing practices, and more. From that position, one not uniquely defined by slavery, they navigated and shaped colonial institutions, leaving behind rich paper trails. Their actions push us to consider the archive not just as a space offering stunted and fragmentary representations of Black life. Archival documents and the institutions producing them were also instruments deployed by people of African descent to their own ends, to build lives of communion, domesticity, pleasure, local sovereignty, or distinctive hierarchies. These roundtables will combine theoretical insights with methodological and empirical comparisons across time and space. Participants will reflect on the relation between archival production and the meanings and experiences of Blackness historically, with Latin America as the center of gravity. In this way, we aim to identify methodologies coming from scholarship on Blackness in Latin America as central and generative both for the study of Latin American and African Diasporic history.