Transition, understood as transformation and displacement, defines early Latin American textualities, where forms of rhetoric, genres, loci of enunciation are crossed within the cultural quagmire of conquest and the colonial order. This process leads to the difficult coexistence of the archaic and the new, tradition and rupture that become evident in the emergence of a new configuration of identities that shed light on “entrelugares” (in-between spaces), which become the foundation of the Latin American literary tradition. This essay proposes four textual figures that delimit new identities: the soldier-conqueror, the translator-migrant, the plebeian, and the woman chronicler. These figures are studied in a range of sixteenth-century texts including chronicles, histories, letters, and reports from New Spain, Peru, and Río de la Plata.