as a vitally important influence. Despite Espaillat's use of that very idiom in her poem, Bilingual/Bilingüe, she also opposes the use of Spanglish, saying, "The language of Cervantes, of Neruda, of Darío and Borges and Sor Juana, and, yes, of Don Pedro Mir, deserves better treatment; and so does the language of Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost." Personal life Of her interracial marriage to Alfred Moskowitz, Espaillat once said, "I met him at the wedding of my best friend, Mimi, and his best friend, Harry. I was still at Hunter College, in my junior year, and we ended up sitting at the same table at the wedding on Thanksgiving Day in 1951. And we started talking, then dancing, and – I know this sounds like madness – he proposed five weeks later on New Year's Eve, and we were married in June of 1952." At the time of their wedding, Rhina Espaillat was only 21-years old. The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants with left-wing views, Moskowitz was an industrial arts teacher, labor union organizer, and sculptor. He had grown up in The Bronx while speaking Yiddish in the home and had fought as a 19-year-old GI during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. According to Esaillat's biographers Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant, "Moskowitz brought to the household a sense of stark realism as experienced by U.S. military personnel during World War II. This was a time when many young Americans took to the front with a profound desire to fight for freedom and justice against regimes that endorsed tyranny and oppression." During their many subsequent decades together, the Moskowitzes had, "many conversations", with each other. "Conversations", according to Espaillat, "when we'd consider how we'd come from different backgrounds, different cultures, even different burroughs, and yet, ultimately, we came together so quickly. And sometimes we'd talk about how various small turns in our earlier lives would have altered everything, and that we would have ended up living completely different lives, with different spouses, different children, and so on – which is quite a frightening thought for two people who are happy together. There were so many earlier ifs that could have changed things. If I'd gone back to Oswego instead of going to school in New York City, if I'd taken that scholarship in Ohio instead of staying at Hunter College, and so on. In life,