What to know
- Toronto Carnival is more than costumes and music — traditional mas characters carry stories of resistance, resilience and cultural survival from across the Caribbean.
- Northern Jumbies is bringing Moko Jumbie culture to Toronto, using year-round workshops and handmade costumes to make the tradition more accessible to the community.
- Blue Devils Mas Camp is reviving “dirty mas,” a traditional form of masquerade rooted in post-emancipation Trinidad and the history of reclaiming public space through performance.
- Both groups are challenging the idea that Carnival is only about “pretty mas,” highlighting the importance of storytelling, ancestry and cultural education alongside celebration.
For many spectators, Toronto Caribbean Carnival is synonymous with glittering beaded costumes, feathered backpacks and all-day soca-fuelled revelry. But tucked away in mas camps across the city, another side of Carnival is being kept alive — the one rooted in resistance, emancipation and the traditions that gave birth to the centuries-old festival.
As masqueraders prepare to chip down the road from near sunrise to sunset at this Saturday’s Grand Parade, some Toronto groups are pushing back against what they see as its commercialization, choosing instead to centre the folklore, ancestral practices and storytelling that have long been part of Carnivals across the diaspora.
Keeping the Moko Jumbie spirit alive in Toronto
Manitoba-born artist and founder of Northern Jumbies, Pixel Heller, says preserving those traditions is deeply personal.
As a second-generation Canadian with Grenadian and Trinidadian roots, Heller launched Northern Jumbies just one year ago with a mission to make Moko Jumbie culture more visible and accessible in Toronto.
“I’ve been performing for a couple years more as a solo individual artist, and then I was like, we need more people doing Moko Jumbie. Like, I really want to spread this and create a community,” she said.
Moko Jumbies trace their origins to West Africa and are some of the most recognizable traditional Carnival characters throughout the Caribbean. Dressed from head to toe in bright colours and towering above crowds on stilts, the masqueraders are often viewed as spiritual protectors and community guardians overlooking villages, embodying both resilience and ancestral connection. Heller points to one story she’s overheard, where the Moko Jumbie crossed the Atlantic Ocean, following the slave ships that were making its way over to the Caribbean.
But Heller says Northern Jumbies is about much more than teaching people to walk on stilts. The collective — made up of roughly 30 to 40 members, including children — hosts workshops and practices year-round ensuring the tradition remains a living part of Toronto’s Caribbean community rather than something that appears only during the Carnival season.
“Moko Jumbie has changed my life in so many ways. It’s made me more grounded, more confident, more connected to my culture, and I just want other people to be able to experience that same joy and pride that I had felt when I first had done it,” she explained. “When it comes to Moko Jumbie, and especially in Toronto, that opportunity isn’t as accessible, and so I wanted to eliminate that barrier and be able to claim space in the Toronto Carnival scene.”
Beyond ‘pretty mas’: Why making mas still matters
Heller’s commitment to the craft is especially important as Toronto Carnival has increasingly become associated with “pretty mas” — defined as the sequined, decorative costumes that have become the dominant visual of the festival.
“I’ve always had a hard time really explaining Carnival in the pretty mas scene, especially nowadays as it’s a very much a more consumer-based thing,” she said. “I find because it’s a competition, things kind of get lost in translation, and then hence you know, now we’re seeing bikinis and thongs that I’ve never seen so small in my life.”
While Heller recognizes the popularity of contemporary Carnival, she believes the festival has become increasingly consumer-driven, with many masqueraders purchasing costumes rather than creating them. For her, making mas is just as important as playing mas. At Northern Jumbies, every member handcrafts their own costumes and masks — a process she says allows each person to express their own story while staying connected to Carnival’s artistic and cultural roots.
“The default option for playing mas in Toronto is to buy a costume from a band. Whereas, everyone in my group makes their own costumes, so we’re actually physically making masks, which then hence creates more artistry and more storytelling.” she said
She also encourages people to explore forms of masquerade beyond the “pretty mas” that often dominates social media.
“I always recommend that if you have the capacity, if you’re able-bodied, to try a different form of masquerade and not the only form that we see online,” Heller said.
The Blue Devil: A masquerade born from resistance
That desire to reconnect Carnival with its roots is shared by the Blue Devils Moko Jumbie Mas Camp.
Co-founded by Natalie Wood in 2023, the group is reviving one of Trinidad’s oldest traditional mas characters rooted in resistance: the Blue Devil.
Covered head-to-toe in blue laundry powder mixed with grease, the Blue Devils are a traditional Carnival character rooted in Trinidad’s post-emancipation history. The masquerade emerged during Canboulay (the torchlit procession that commemorated the end of slavery and laid the foundation for modern Caribbean Carnival) as formerly enslaved people transformed the celebration into their own after being excluded from the elaborate masquerade balls of the colonial elite.
The character is an adaptation of the Jab Molassie — derived from the French patois jab (devil) and molassie (molasses) — whose performers traditionally coated their bodies in a black mixture of molasses, tar or oil and wore horns and chains. In the Trinidadian village of Paramin, where sugar production was scarce, masqueraders substituted the dark coating with blue laundry powder, giving rise to the Blue Devil tradition that continues today.
Rather than presenting polished costumes, performers embrace what is often called “dirty mas” — a style that prioritizes storytelling, history and transformation over the glitz and glam.
“It embodies the trauma of slavery, and also the beauty of resilience,” Woods explained. “Many of the institutions that were created are still around, whether it is from the police to education, right? We’re dealing with some of the same narratives around who belongs and who doesn’t belong. So, in the afterlife of slavery, Blue Devils still perform. We’re still performing because it is still necessary for us to perform.”
This year, the Blue Devils Moko Jumbie Mas Camp will join Carnival Nationz on the road, but the group’s focus extends beyond this weekend. Alongside preserving traditional mas, the group incorporates environmental sustainability, community engagement and accessible programming into its work, creating opportunities for people of all backgrounds to learn about Carnival’s deeper cultural significance.
Why traditional mas still matters today
Like Heller, Wood believes conversations around Carnival are often dominated by revealing costumes and social media imagery, with little attention paid to the history behind them. But, she argues that the exposure of the body has always been part of Carnival, pointing to the Jamettes — working-class women in 19th-century Trinidad who challenged colonial norms by reclaiming public space and bodily autonomy, even as they were branded vulgar and disorderly by the elite.
But Woods argues it’s not the costumes themselves that are the problem, but the loss of the cultural context that gives them meaning.
“In the Carnival now, it’s mostly women, almost 80 to 90% women, right? And those women are wearing very little,” she said. “But when you look at those women who are loving up their bodies, it’s all shapes and sizes. It’s not the typical white European model body that you see out there. You see big women, and they’re loving up themselves in a world where their bodies are hated.”
Woods continues.
“I hear the folks saying, ‘Oh, this is not respectable.’ But Carnival was never respectable. Just as African people were never respectable, and to some extent, some could argue will never be because we don’t fit that European standard. So I see it as a sense of empowerment for these women who struggle all year, who spend a lot of money to wear nothing.”
Despite the shift, both founders see growing interest in traditional mas among younger generations.
For Heller, seeing children learn to become Moko Jumbies represents more than passing on a performance skill, and more of a confidence in knowing that the cultural knowledge will survive.
And as for Wood, as she passes on the traditions to her daughter, each Blue Devil who steps onto the road carries forward a story that began centuries ago, for many generations to come.
