David and Goliath in Caribbean English

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Cocolo community formed in the Dominican Republic from the mid nineteenth century onward, as English-speaking laborers from the British Caribbean arrived to work the sugar fields of the southeast and, unlike many migrant labor communities, set down permanent roots, establishing their own churches, schools and mutual aid lodges that kept them culturally and linguistically distinct from the surrounding Spanish-speaking Dominican Catholic majority for generations. Out of that distinct community grew a performance tradition that borrowed freely from both worlds it stood between: African-derived music, rhythm and dance carried from the Caribbean fused with dramatized scenes and characters drawn from the Bible and from medieval European legend, among them a costumed staging of David and Goliath performed in the community's own Caribbean English.

Troupes historically brought this repertoire out at Christmas, on Saint Peter's Day and during carnival, staging costumed processions and short dramatic scenes as part of the wider Caribbean tradition of masquerade and street theatre tied to the Christian calendar. The result was neither a straightforward Caribbean import nor a Dominican Catholic form but something built specifically at the meeting point of the two, a religious storytelling tradition that could only have taken the shape it did inside a community holding two cultural inheritances, English Caribbean and Dominican Spanish Catholic, at once.