Victor Barbosa: Taking Happiness
With Him
In
a 16th-floor apartment in the Abraham Lincoln public
housing project in the South Bronx, Karen Cintron, 16,
slipped a videotape into a VCR. A moment later, a rap
video appeared on the screen. The group performing,
Silex, included her brother, Victor Barbosa.
Mr. Barbosa, 23, was a runner at Windows on the World
during the day, but he pursued a career in music during
his time off. After two rap videos that dealt with Bronx
street life was a third, produced by a group he had been
in earlier, Hurakanes, with an upbeat rhythm and a
message about living for the present. Mr. Barbosa took
the microphone. "Vive de alegría y de gozadera,"
he sang. "Porque cuando uno muere eso es lo que se
lleva."
"Live with happiness and joy because when you die,
that is what you take with you." Mr. Barbosa's mother,
Nancy Santana, 43, was watching the video for the first
time, and crying.
The family of five shares a three-bedroom apartment
where three candles burn perpetually for Mr. Barbosa. He
had slept in his own room, while his sisters Arlene
Barbosa, 22, and Karen shared one room, and his mother
shared another with his brother, 6, and youngest sister,
1.
Mr. Barbosa's room has been kept largely as he left it
on Sept. 11, his clothes still neatly in place in the
closet. Rather than always doubling up with Karen, Arlene
Barbosa admitted, from time to time she sleeps in her
brother's room.
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