Framing ethnography as a form of democratic inquiry, this study examines how the author worked with a group of Mexican and Vietnamese American adolescents to learn and apply ethnographic tools to interrogate language and literacy ideologies in their school and community. Examination of the students' findings reveals circulating ideologies and narratives of English monolingualism in schools, as well as their own complex literacy repertoires that worked against Standard English deficit models. This study demonstrates the democratic potential of welcoming diverse students into their own ethnographic research for literacy learning. The study equally provides insights for teachers and researchers into the mundane ways that literacy and language ideologies are produced schools and how students work to resist these through their own practices.