Portuguese Heritage Month in California often invites us to look backward. We remember pioneers and immigrants, dairy families and fishermen, festas and bands, language and faith. We celebrate the roads our ancestors walked and the communities they built. Such remembrance is necessary. A people without memory eventually loses its place in history.
Yet memory alone is not enough.
If a community wishes to endure, it must not only preserve its past; it must continue to interpret it. It must tell new stories. It must ask new questions. It must examine itself honestly and creatively. It must produce literature.
This is why Anthony Barcellos’s Count Me Out: The Education of Paul Francisco arrives as such an important contribution to Portuguese-American letters.
At first glance, the novel appears to be a coming-of-age story. It follows Paul Francisco, a young Californian of Azorean ancestry, as he navigates family, school, language, religion, and the often-unspoken expectations of the Portuguese-American world that shaped him. The setting is largely the California Portuguese community of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with echoes that extend well into the 1980s. Yet to describe the book merely as a coming-of-age novel would be to diminish its achievement.
Barcellos does not simply describe a community. He recreates it. The world of dairies, grandparents, parish life, classrooms, language transitions, family obligations, and cultural assumptions emerges not as sociology but as literature. The reader encounters a living landscape populated by recognizable voices and complicated human beings. Barcellos writes with affection, but never sentimentality. He understands that communities are strengthened not by mythmaking but by honest observation. His characters are allowed their dignity, but also their contradictions.
This may be the novel’s greatest contribution. For many years, Portuguese-American writing often focused on preservation. We documented immigration stories. We recorded memories. We celebrated achievements. These efforts were and remain indispensable. Without them, much of our collective experience would already have disappeared. But communities also need writers willing to move beyond documentation into interpretation. They need authors who can examine culture through a creative and critical lens simultaneously.
Anthony Barcellos does exactly that. As noted in the publisher’s reflection on the book, Count Me Out explores how identity is formed not through dramatic historical moments but through everyday encounters, conversations, misunderstandings, and observations. It reveals how language, family expectations, education, religion, and social class shape an individual’s consciousness.
The result is a novel that feels deeply Portuguese-American while also being unmistakably American.
Yet the importance of this book extends beyond its literary merit. The Portuguese-American community of the 1960s and 1970s was not the community of 2000. The community of 2000 is not the community of 2026. Demographics have shifted. Immigration patterns have changed. Language usage has evolved. Questions of identity, belonging, gender, race, sexuality, faith, education, and cultural continuity have all acquired new dimensions.
Literature remains timeless, but communities are not static. That reality creates an urgent challenge.
If Count Me Out helps us understand a Portuguese-American California that existed in the second half of the twentieth century, who is writing about the Portuguese-American California of today? Who is documenting the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants? Who is writing about mixed families, multilingual households, LGBTQ+ Portuguese-Americans, college students, professionals, artists, activists, and young people navigating identities that are simultaneously local, national, and global?
Where are the novels? The memoirs? The poetry collections? The essays? The chronicles? The creative nonfiction? A living culture requires all of them. Some writing will be exceptional. Some will be merely competent. Some will be deeply personal. Some will be scholarly. Some will be experimental. Some will be traditional. Such variation is not a weakness. It is evidence of vitality.
We must, of course, maintain standards. Good writing matters. Craft matters. Literature demands discipline, revision, and artistic integrity. Yet communities cannot produce great literature if they first convince themselves that only greatness deserves to be written. We need writers. We need fiction writers and poets. We need essayists and playwrights. We need journalists and chroniclers. We need historians and biographers. We need memoirists and translators. We need those who preserve memory and those who challenge it. We need those who celebrate the community and those who question it. We need those who write from the center and those who write from the margins.
Every community archive begins with somebody deciding that a story is worth telling. That is why books such as Count Me Out matter. They remind us that the Portuguese-American experience is not merely a subject for history. It is a source of literature. It is not merely a collection of facts. It is a landscape of imagination, memory, conflict, humor, longing, and transformation.
Anthony Barcellos has shown us one path. Others must now follow.
As we celebrate Portuguese Heritage Month in California, perhaps the greatest tribute we can offer our ancestors is not merely to remember their stories, but to continue telling our own. The future of our community depends not only on preserving what was inherited, but also on creating what has not yet been written. Bruma Publications stands ready to assist in that effort. The voices are here. The stories are here. The experiences are here. What remains is the courage to write them.
The novel is availaber as a Kindle e-book, a paperback and a hardcover through Amazon.
