From the pit
Alison Hinds at Cambridge Carnival. Second Sunday in September, Central Square, and the Queen of Soca on the main stage. Cambridge Carnival International has been running since the early 1990s, born as a small street fair at University Park Commons and grown into the biggest festival in the city, a costume parade that rolls from the river through Central Square toward MIT with steel bands, mas bands and sound trucks behind it. It is built on the Trinidad and Brazil carnival model and rooted in something older: the African and Caribbean tradition of carnival as the one day the community got to take the street. Cambridge does it with hand-built costumes and a volunteer committee that plans it year-round: a grand costume parade that steps off around midday by the river on River Street, runs through Central Square and up Main Street toward Kendall and MIT, then a festival on the square with steel pan, KidsFest, Caribbean food and craft vendors and a main stage that runs until evening. The weekend usually opens with Pan in the Park, a steel band showcase that teaches the history of the instrument alongside the music. The festival has survived a cancellation in 2019, a virtual year in 2020 and a move back to its University Park roots, and it marked its 30th anniversary in 2024. Now in its fourth decade, Cambridge Carnival draws well over a hundred thousand people and stands as the largest festival in the city, a week after Boston Carnival and the New York Labor Day parade, closing out the New England carnival season. For 2026 the headliner was Alison Hinds, and there is no bigger name you can put on a soca stage. London-born and Barbados-raised, she joined Square One in 1988 and spent the next decade and a half turning that band into the sound of Crop Over, with Faluma and Raggamuffin carrying Bajan soca far past the island. She went solo in 2004 and the very next year gave the whole Caribbean an anthem in Roll It Gal, the song that made her the Queen of Soca in title and in fact, a woman-first record that still runs any carnival road from Bridgetown to Brooklyn. She has taken Crop Over Party Monarch and Road March crowns, headlined carnivals across the region and the diaspora, and nearly forty years in she still commands a stage the way few artists in any genre do. On Sunday Alison Hinds brought all of that to Cambridge. Bajan flags went up the second the band hit, and by the time Roll It Gal dropped the whole square was moving as one. Boston is a reggae and dancehall town first, but on this day it was soca, and Alison Hinds owned it. BOBBYSHAKES was on the barricade for the set and on the road for the mas.
Words & photography — Bobby Shakes