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A Devil’s Mask and a Golden Rock: The Caribbean Thread in the Archive, and a Trip You Could Take

Angela Sutton kept leaving her desk: for a Dutch Caribbean island, a conference in Barbados, a reading room full of old maps. What those posts teach about using a place, and how to use the Dominican Republic the same way in February.

Most of this archive was written at ordinary desks. One writer kept leaving. Angela Sutton, who introduced herself here in 2016, wrote posts from a Dutch Caribbean island, about a conference in Barbados, and about a university makerspace where a Dominican devil’s mask was being coaxed out of a 3D printer. Read together, those posts are a short course in how a historian uses a place. They also raise a practical question: what would you do with a week in the Dominican Republic if you cared about this history? We reread the Caribbean posts and sketched an answer.

A devil’s mask on a hospital printer

The most unexpected Caribbean object in the archive turns up in 3D Printing & The Digital Humanities. Vanderbilt’s makerspace, the Wond’ry, had offered the Slave Societies Digital Archive space for an exhibit, and three radiologists from Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital agreed to scan and print replicas of objects too fragile to leave out unsupervised. Among them was an oversized carnival mask of the Diablo Cojuelo from the Dominican Republic. Sutton describes it as papier-mâché, used during carnival season by descendants of the enslaved, hollow, with pointed ears, horns, a giant nose and sharp teeth, and with the eyes and mouth cut out.

It was the object that prompted the most discussion. One of them, Steven Lewis, explains in the post that the mask nearly filled the build platform of their largest printer and still had to be scaled down slightly because the horns stuck out past the printable area. They tried it as a thin shell and watched the layers separate as they cooled. In the end they gave it a flat back and printed it face up. Sutton’s interest was less in the engineering than in the argument it forced: which features of a reproduction carry the cultural meaning, and at what point does a compromise made for the printer change what the object is? Her conclusion was that the sturdier replicas gave visitors a closeness and a tactile experience the originals could not. The post does not say which town the mask came from, and we will not guess.

Saltwater and history

Six weeks earlier Sutton had posted late, and unapologetically, from Sint Eustatius. Where History is Alive is the archive’s clearest statement of why a historian travels. The island, known as the Golden Rock, was in her account the center of Atlantic commerce in the 1700s, much of it deemed illicit by rival European powers. Because larger cruise ships have nowhere to dock there, the remains are still lying around: yellow bricks shipped from the Ijssel region of the Netherlands, sherds of Delftware in the runoff from forts and plantations, glass trade beads that divers keep finding in the sand. Residents live on top of the sites.

What she got from being there was not atmosphere but correction. Several things historians repeat about the island, she decided, must have been written in error if they were not outright invented. She had been through the same thing in Ghana in 2010, after reading about the Gold Coast slave forts in documents at The Hague. On the ground she walked the trails named in the sources to time them, judged which cannon shots in the literature were possible from the distances between forts and the sea, and noted where the shadows fell and which way the wind blew. On Statia the same method told her which bays could hold ships, how many enslaved workers a plantation might have held at one time, and what the governor could see from his desk. Those are evidence, not impressions, and she says they will breathe life into a book she had not realized was missing something.

The Caribbean as a working region

The island trip sits inside a larger pattern. In The Pirate Enthusiast, her introduction to readers, Sutton describes a manuscript on seventeenth-century Gold Coast rivalries built from archives in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, and a job helping to curate endangered documents about Africans and their descendants in the Americas. By 2018 that work, in the Slave Societies Digital Archive, was shaping her summers. The Smart Women’s Summer, Part 1 finds her just back from Barbados, where she presented its Caribbean holdings at the Association of Caribbean Historians’ annual meeting. She is plainly fond of it: about half its members come from institutions in the region, it runs simultaneous translation so that scholars working in English, Spanish and French can question each other, and its closing party is written into the constitution.

The same post describes a fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, where she and two old friends read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean maps for their silences, since mapmakers, like record-keepers, left out indigenous and enslaved people. More than a year later, in Collaborative Writing in the Humanities, she reports a co-authored article accepted by The Historical Journal and a list of lessons about working at a distance, from switching tools without embarrassment to being honest about who needs the publication more. The Atlantic world covers four continents and four centuries with sources in dozens of languages, and no one person can hold it.

Tanya Roth’s The History Teacher Abroad is about Cambridge, not the Caribbean, but it belongs here for one line. After a week in a seminar called “Why History Matters,” part of a program with participants from Trinidad, Denmark, Pakistan and Taiwan, among other places, she wrote that they had not just read about history; they had encountered it. The wish to put the body where the documents were runs through these posts.

If you go: Carnival season

Which brings us to the Dominican Republic, the one place in these posts an ordinary traveler can reach without a research grant. The Diablo Cojuelo on Sutton’s printer is a carnival figure, and Dominican carnival belongs to February, with celebrations on the Sundays of the month building toward Independence Day on February 27. The name means roughly “the limping devil,” a figure with roots in Spanish folklore. One of the best-known carnivals is in La Vega, a city in the Cibao valley north of the capital, where troupes of diablos cojuelos in horned masks and heavy, bell-hung costumes work through the streets swinging inflated bladders at anyone who gets close. Santo Domingo holds a large national parade along the Malecón on a Sunday toward the end of the season. Dates move from year to year, so check the Ministry of Culture’s announcements before you book.

For a reader of this archive the masks are the point. They are still largely made by hand, often from papier-mâché, by local mask-makers, and they look like the object Sutton describes: horns, teeth, a nose out of all proportion, the whole face pushed toward the grotesque. Seeing one worn and moving answers the question the printing conversations kept raising about which features matter. Probably all of them, and also the body underneath.

Santo Domingo for the archive-minded

If you are going for the history, fly into Santo Domingo (Las Américas), and stay in the Colonial Zone. It is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, and the district has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990. The first cathedral in the Americas stands there, and so does the Alcázar de Colón, the house built for Diego Columbus. The Museo de las Casas Reales, in buildings that once held the colonial royal court and the governor’s offices, covers the Spanish period. The Archivo General de la Nación, the national archive, is elsewhere in the city rather than in the old town, and it is the place to ask what colonial-era and nineteenth-century state and notarial records survive; parish registers are usually kept by the church, so ask the archive where to look. Write ahead in Spanish, bring identification, and expect a first visit to be about finding out what exists rather than reading it.

The Colonial Zone is walkable, and you will not want a car inside it. A car earns its keep for everything beyond it. The archive is a ride away, the beaches east of the city are an easy morning, and the old towns along the south coast only open up if you have your own wheels. Renting a car for a few days in Santo Domingo makes more sense than hiring a taxi for each outing, and it is the simplest way to do an archive in the morning and a site visit of the kind Sutton describes in the afternoon.

The road to La Vega

La Vega is inland, a couple of hours up the main highway from the capital, and on carnival Sundays the whole region is on the move. Leave early, expect the last stretch into town to crawl, and plan to park on the edge and walk in. The Cordillera Central begins just beyond the city, and if you add a side trip to the mountain towns of Jarabacoa or Constanza you will find that phone signal comes and goes on the climbing roads. Downloading offline maps before you drive inland is a small chore that saves a long argument at a fork with no bars on the phone. Carry cash for fuel and roadside food, keep an eye on the gauge, and do not count on an easy run back to the capital after dark; getting out of a carnival crowd takes longer than the map suggests.

Writing about a place you visited

What the archive models, finally, is how to write a place up afterward. Sutton’s Statia post does not describe sunsets; it records what the ground made impossible. Even her 2018 post about her writing desk mentions Bajan pepper sauce left out on the desk, and among her work worries a grant application tied to the St. Eustatius project, so the region never quite leaves the page. If you go to La Vega with a notebook, the useful entries will be the same kind: how far the sound of the parade carries, how heavy a mask is when a maker lets you hold one, what the archive clerk said was missing and why. Those are the details a reader can check and a later writer can build on. That is the standard these posts set, and the reason they are still worth rereading.

The posts in this essay

Written for the Smart Women Write archive, October 16, 2026. Quotations belong to the authors of the original posts.