The three papers that conform this panel explore various dimensions of Black mobility across transnational and transimperial spaces from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Whether conceived as trajectories across the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, or Atlantic, the African diasporic movements studied here center the movements of Black communities and individuals to and from New Spain (colonial Mexico), Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti) and New Orleans, Louisiana. Focusing on the 1818-1831 period, Hannah J. Francis (Rice University) examines the passports issued to over four hundred free and enslaved travelers of color in the City Archives of the New Orleans Public Library. In so doing, Francis elucidates the mobility of people of African descent and the linkages they established to France, Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico, among other destinations. This examination of nineteenth-century forms of identification for the purposes of travel is analogous to the strategic fabrication of personal narratives as documentation for seventeenth-century asylum cases. After the abduction and displacement of over 1,400 afrodescendientes following the 1683 raid on Veracruz (Mexico), asylum narratives became crucial instruments in determining the communities of belonging and possible trajectories of Black survivors of the pirate attack. Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva (University of Rochester) analyzes the case of one such survivor through the contested deposition of Antonio, a fourteen-year-old boy “of the Mina nation,” before the governor of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Drawing on archival material from seventeenth-century archives, the case exposes officials’ dependence on African testimony (even contradictory testimony) at “the moment of fact creation” when determining the causes for Black flight to Spanish domains. Whether studied through Spanish manuscripts or French periodicals, the question of fugitivity, Black personhood, and future possibilities of freedom loomed large for children, adolescents, and adults in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Accordingly, Crystal N. Eddins (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) takes up the question of marronage in colonial Haiti through the lens of childhood. Through analysis of fugitive advertisements published in Les affiches américaines, alongside Evelyn Trouillot and Isabel Allende’s fictional accounts, Eddins illustrates how some children consciously became part of the fabric of resistance in colonial Haiti.