In this brief essay, and making use of my own research in Peru, I raise two issues that I have been reflecting on throughout my career and that I believe constitute challenges in addressing language in society. The first refers to the importance of studying the processes of meaning production from an ethnographic perspective, and the second, to the centrality of articulating the production of these meanings with the material conditions of existence that make them possible or difficult. These two points are committed to combining ethnographic sociolinguistics and glotopolitics, as critical perspectives that are enhancing sociolinguistics in Latin America.