and their families resettled in New York City. During these events, Espaillat's mother suffered a miscarriage while pregnant with a son. After recovering, Dulce Maria, knowing that life in New York City would be difficult, decided that her daughter would be better looked after by relatives in their homeland. In response, Dulce Maria made the high risk decision to secretly return to the Dominican Republic. During the visit, Dulce Maria left Rhina to be cared for by her paternal grandmother in La Vega. Dulce Maria then visited her own mother and siblings in Jarabacoa, said her last goodbyes, collected her sewing machine, and returned to the United States without attracting the attention of Trujillo's police. For the next two years, Espaillat was raised by her paternal grandmother and aunts in La Vega, where Spanish language poetry was always being recited out loud. Espaillat's grandmother also played Spanish classical guitar. Espaillat has since stated that, "those experiences made me much more of an ear poet than an eye poet". In 1939, however, Espaillat's parents felt more settled in the United States and Rhina joined them in a New York City apartment on West Forty-Ninth Street in Hell's Kitchen. Refugee As a young child, Espaillat rapidly learned American English and adapted very quickly to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of wartime Manhattan, but she deeply missed her loving extended family in the Dominican Republic. In a 2017 interview, Espaillat recalled, "I think that as an immigrant, you create a family, and in New York, it’s interesting to do that. Everybody’s there. I was surrounded by Jewish kids in the school, and Italian kids, and Germans, and even Japanese who were having a rough time at that point, because the war was starting. So I ran into people who were, as my father said, just like us. They’re running from somebody. My father was a political exile. He explained that Jewish people were running from Europe because there were bad things happening. And I said, 'You mean they’re like us?' He said, 'Yes. The world is full of people like us, because the world is full of people just like Rafael Trujillo.'" In addition to closely following world events, Espaillat's parents were also, "avid readers of literature and history in their native Spanish", and, from the age of five onwards, Espaillat was listening to her father's almost constant poetry recitations, which, "ran the gamut of