Bedeviled in La Vega.

• Author: Murphy-Larronde, Suzanne
• Position: FESTIVALS - Dominican Republic

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He might well be a character from your own worst nightmare, and he's standing only a few feet away: a hulking extraterrestrial apparition in volumninous red satin robes and a matching plumed headdress with two menacing horns. His yellow triangular face scarcely contains a pair of swooping brows set above bulging bloodshot eyes, a grotesque simian nose, and fang-filled mouth permanently frozen in a wicked snarl. In one gloved hand he grasps a plastic bottle of designer water and an inflated cow bladder, or vejiga, and in the crux of his other arm he cradles a slumbering infant whose young parents are busy recording this surrealistic portrait on diminutive camera phones. Then the baby, now awake and smiling, is gently transferred to her mother's outstretched hands, and after a hurried "thank you," the family of three is off through a sea of people in search of more monster photo ops.

This is just one of the rituals that plays out over four consecutive Sunday afternoons each February in La Vega, a mostly quiet fanning community in the Dominican Republic's fertile Cibao Valley, a 90-minute drive northwest of Santo Domingo. Despite its off-the-beaten-track location and competition from neighboring towns that stage their own pre-Lenten celebrations, La Vega, with a population of about 60,000, has made a name for itself as the island's undisputed capital of carnival. It is the favorite venue for attending shenanigan-filled street parties, dancing to high-decibel merengue and bachata tunes, and rubbing elbows with los diablos cojuelos, the famous limping devils who are the event's colorful, rambunctious, and ever-evolving superstars.

Experts disagree as to the exact origins of carnival in this nation of more than nine million inhabitants in the Greater Antilles. Some, like the late folklore specialist Fradique Lizardo, believe they date back as far as the 1520s to La Vega's original location, today called La Vega Vieja--a colonial settlement founded by Christopher Columbus and leveled in 1562 by a cataclysmic earthquake. Whatever the birthplace, these annual festivities eventually came to be celebrated countrywide and by the mid-1800s had incorporated commemorations of Dominican Independence Day, February 27, into their folds. In the early twentieth century, the carnival's mostly Spanish roots had permanently fused with African, French, Canary Island, and Caribbean influences to form a unique Dominican hybrid. But by the 1970s, it was carnival La Vega style, with its competing groups of colorfully garbed paraders known as compatio.s, that began to attract increasing attention for the creativity and quality of costumes and masks. In 1977, the town's February celebrations were singled out for National Folkloric Heritage status.

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Then, as now, the event's main attractions are its fierce diablos cojuelos--so named, as the story goes, after a legendary demon whose reputation as an incorrigible prankster got him kicked out of Hell with an injured leg in the bargain. The outlandish outfit he wears, reminiscent of a medieval court jester's, combines wide pants and a flowing shirt of...