This chapter develops a critical language ethnography approach to community-based research. The authors propose that this approach can offer rich qualitative insights into those everyday interactions through which children and adults acquire and impart locally accepted norms for language use in their communities while also co-constructing social identities and collective practices that can resist and change oppressive structures. The chapter reviews ethnographic projects that work not only to depict the cultural underpinnings of community life but that also seek to disrupt those structural forces that produce inequities across communities. By integrating insights from the fields of Language Socialization (LS) and Critical Ethnography (CE), the authors seek to bring into conversation complementary subfields within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and education that share a commitment to community-centered research. The chapter is organized thematically around three themes of power, praxis, and positionality and it provides a critical case analysis to illustrate the ways in which a critical language ethnography can be used to analyze everyday interaction in communities.