Over the past decade, community collaborations have come into focus within the HCI and CSCW fields. Largely the result of increased concern for social and contextual dimensions of practice, these partnerships facilitate a pathway for researchers and practitioners to foreground the nuances of technology as it takes place in the real world. How these collaborations are engaged, what values mediate them, and how practices might vary across geographies remain active research questions. In this paper, we contribute by zooming into the experience of four HCI and CSCW researchers engaging in community collaborations in Latin America (LATAM). Through a collaborative autoethnography (CAE), we identify three main value tensions impacting HCI practices and methods in research collaborations with LATAM communities: camaraderie vs. cautiousness, informality vs. formality and hopefulness vs. transparency. Building on our findings, we provide three recommendations for researchers interested in engaging in community-based research in similar contexts.