Toronto's Caribbean affair.

Mas camps are thick tales of spies from rival bands trying to take a sneak peak at the competition

The early afternoon sun is beating down hard on Lakeshore Boulevard and underfoot the asphalt is white hot. More than a million spectators have turned out for the annual Caribana parade and as usual, it is noisy beyond belief, colorful beyond imagination. Ear-piercing whistles trill above the din. Heavily amplified reggae bands powered by noisy gasoline-powered electrical generators play from the decks of dozens of fiat-bed semi-trailers inching down the road. Dancers in matching costumes strut their stuff by the thousands, while dozens of jaw-dropping "big mas" costumes (mas is short for masquerade) tower and sway twelve feet and more above the crowd, shimmering with iridescent eye-popping hues. Despite the heat, no one is leaving. At the best of times, this parade takes eight hours to dawdle along a two-and-a-half-mile route skirting the northern shore of Lake Ontario.

Caribana is the tangy scent of jerk chicken, the sweet lilt of island accents, and the cool taste of a Jamaican Red Stripe beer. It is the easy rhythm of reggae and the tingling sound of steel band calypso. It is North America's largest celebration of Caribbean culture--held as far from palm trees, sugar cane, and the turquoise waters of the Caribbean as you can get--in Toronto, Canada. Still, where else but in Canada's largest city would one expect to find this northern interpretation of Carnival, the pre-Lenten blowout celebrated in southern climes? Where else but in Toronto, multicultural mecca, where City Hall speaks in eight languages, where street signs and subways chatter in more, and parades are held at the drop of a hat?

Toronto's Good Friday parade--complete with a reenactment of the Crucifixion--attracts hundreds of thousands of parade watchers yearly to the city's Little Italy. At Chinese New Year, fifty-foot dragons weave through the largest of the city's three Chinatowns, and Danforth Avenue in Greektown is closed every spring for the Greek Independence Day parade. But the biggest turnout of all is for Caribana.

The first Caribana, launched as a one-shot street festival in 1967 to celebrate Canada's centennial as a nation, attracted crowds of a mere seventy-five thousand. But the festival soon took on a life of its own. Now African as well as Central and South American communities take part, and Caribana stretches from late July to early August. It is a two-week binge of everything Caribbean--from parties, dances, and plays to food, fashion, and commerce. It is family reunions, steel-band competitions, calypso boat cruises at night, a Junior Carnival Parade, where kids don little mas costumes, and a two-day "family picnic" on Olympic Island in Toronto Harbor.

Twelve-deep crowds of spectators often spill onto the road to join the parade. In the early years, the mas players were constantly jostled, and the big mas frequently tangled, slowing the parade to a fourteen-hour marathon. So the parade was moved to Lakeshore Boulevard and up went the crowd barriers. Still, they have not dampened the spirit of the old days.

For people like Ken deFrietas, Caribana is more than a party; it is a life-style. He is one of more than thirty "band" leaders who make Caribana possible. Some bands will number as many as two thousand followers in the parade, some just a few hundred. As early as March deFrietas and dozens of others fan out across Toronto to rent space for their mas camps, where thousands of volunteers will sew costumes and build the dozens of larger-than-life big mas costumes that define Caribana. Among these band leaders competition is fierce for the coveted best big mas awards for the king and queen of the bands. The mas camps are always thick with tales of "spies" from rival bands trying to take a sneak peek at the competition.

With seven hundred to nine hundred members, band leader Louis Saldenah's parade is usually one of the largest. Last year his expenses totaled $120,000. "It costs $10,000 just to rent warehouse space for four months," he points out. Saldenah covers 70 percent of his expenses by selling costumes to band members, but the remaining 30 percent must come from fundraising parties, grants, and other sources.

So, ask deFrietas, a Trinidadian, why he endures this time-consuming and frequently frustrating role. "If there was no Caribana, I'd cut my grass and work in my garden and there'd be no stress, but I love it, even with the stress .... It's just something you love."

There is no air conditioning in deFrietas's rented warehouse, but all around volunteers toil at work benches along the walls, stitching colored sequins onto satiny fabric, tacking trim onto colorful headbands, and fashioning eerie masks for the hundreds of matching costumes that deFrietas's band will wear in the parade.

One big mas costume alone "takes six people going around the clock for three to four weeks," says deFrietas, now marking his fifteenth year as a band leader. In addition, hundreds of individual band member costumes and props must be sewn and fabricated.

Building the big mas has become an art form these days. "Every year the mas has to be better," says a volunteer atop a step ladder, attaching bright ribbons to the top of deFrietas's Queen Mas. "Anyone can build an old mas," he says, "on a rigid heavy frame." The trick lies in fabricating lighter, contemporary designs "that move and glide, so the dancer inside can flap the wings, turn the head, and so on."

Off to one side stands Ryan, a young man in his early twenties, one of several "dancers" who will pilot deFrietas's King Mas down Lakeshore Boulevard. He is here for a fitting. Minutes later he is standing inside the half-completed costume as helpers adjust a support harness that dangles from a crudely welded frame supported by four small wheels. Ryan's job is making several hundred pounds of costume and frame come to life when it counts. Judging of the big mas rests not only on artistry and design but on how creatively the person inside the heavy mas dances.

The king and queen of the bands competition, which takes place two nights before the Caribana parade, is a stunning spectacle, a beauty pageant for the big mas. Thousands line the bleachers at Toronto's Lamport Stadium, facing a large stage built over the green artificial turf. One after another, lit by crossed spotlights, the big mas sparkle to life as the dancers strut their stuff. There is everything from a twenty-foot-tall green grasshopper with golden wings and long waving antennae to a pudgy ten-foot chicken; from a fanciful thirty-foot-wide glittering wasp to an abstract pink-plumed creation. Most glide smoothly on and off the stage, except for one, which loses a wheel in mid-performance; with the encouragement of the crowd, its dancer pushes on with all the grace she can muster.

On one level the big mas are simply fun. But, according to author Shehla Burney, they mirror the historical imagery of many cultures, from Creole to Aztec, from Moorish to Indian and Arab. West Indian culture has multicultural origins, she has written, "unlike our stereotypical suppositions, the Caribbean people are racially, linguistically, and culturally mixed, hailing from Spanish, French, English, Chinese, Filipino, East Indian, Latin American, and African backgrounds." "Caribana," she points out, "thus symbolizes the reaffirmation of displaced identities in the placeless cultures of metropolises such as Toronto, New York, and London, which also celebrate the Caribbean Mas .... Masks, costumes, makeup, music, and themes reveal the confluence of many cultures .... The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, half serpent and half man, may be represented side by side with the Spanish mythology of El Dorado. ... The profuse use of plumes stems from Amerindian and African religions and symbolizes spiritual flight."

Caribana is not without controversy. Five years ago, some celebrants turned up in only gorilla masks, shorts, and sneakers, their bodies smeared with grease and food coloring, a throwback to decades past in Trinidad when those with no money for costumes deliberately dressed down to celebrate Carnival. Another group satirized the glitz and hefty budgets of Caribana with simple homemade "greenback" costumes bearing large dollar signs to underscore what they thought Caribana had become. Caribana's organizing committee always seems to be in debt. Last year some band leaders boycotted the parade to protest the lack of a C$350,000 government subsidy to help make up the shortfall. This year a blue-ribbon advisory panel worked out a financial solution, with the City of Toronto and the provincial government providing matching grants of C$353,000. Some of the money will help defray the band leaders' costs, and some will go to the Caribana Cultural Committee. Still, security remains an issue. Last year, due to single violent incidents in 1993 and 1996, organizers had to rewrite security plans before police would give the parade the green light. In spite of these worries, "It's 100 percent Caribana will go ahead," says city councillor Joe Mehevic. And, as one band leader observed, with tourists flying in from the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond, Caribana brings C$250 million to Toronto every summer, generating C$35 million in tax revenues. It is hard to imagine killing a golden goose like that.

Back on Lakeshore Boulevard, it is late afternoon and an eighteen wheeler bearing a blaring soca band is crawling by. A young woman waves a twenty-dollar bill in the air and when a nearby policeman turns his head, she leaps the barrier and with outstretched hand a musician pulls her up onto the moving platform. Neither think of the danger of falling under the giant wheels. Her tip is refused, and as the truck passes by, the last anyone sees of her is a big smile as she sways to the band's music.

At parade's end hundreds of tired masqueraders lie in the shade under the trees that line the south side of Lakeshore Boulevard, cooled by a lake breeze. Trucks move in to cart away the big mas, which later will be taken apart for souvenirs and salvage for next year's costumes. Unbelievably, many of the big mas die here on the spot. Caribana is nearly done for another year; it will take a cold Canadian winter to start fantasizing next year's show stoppers--big mas even bigger and better than ever before.

A Toronto-based photojournalist, Colin King has photographed Caribana since 1989.