which had been founded by Christopher Columbus in 1494. While growing up in La Vega, the Espaillat family lived near an historic fort on Independence Avenue, surrounded by a large community of extended family and friends who shared their dedication to art, music, and poetry. Espaillat was often taken to visit relatives in her mother's hometown of Jarabacoa, which is now a popular resort. Espaillat began composing poetry in Spanish when she was only 4-years of age. Her first poems were written down by her grandmother, who told Espaillat that her poems were all wonderful and that she was a poet. None of those first poems, however, still survive. In 1937, a five-year old Espaillat accompanied her parent on a diplomatic mission to Washington, D.C.. At the time, Espaillat's great-uncle and god-father, Rafael Brache, headed the Dominican delegation and Espaillat's father was the legation's secretary. Rafael Brache had supported the 1930 coup d'etat that had brought Rafael Trujillo to power. Furthermore, Brache's duties ever since becoming Ambassador to the United States in 1934 had mainly involved defending Trujillo's public reputation, which was suffering due to reports of political assassinations, human rights abuses, and the censorship of the press. In 1937, however, Trujillo issued orders to the Dominican Army that resulted in the genocidal Parsley massacre of an estimated 20,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic. In response, a horrified Rafael Brache wrote a letter to Trujillo which denounced the massacre and said, "he could no longer be associated with a government that had committed such a terrible criminal act." According to Espaillat, "we did learn that the dictator was absolutely furious when he received it." At that time, however, there was little or no organized opposition to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and, in November 1937, a majority vote by the National Congress declared Rafael Brache and three other critics of the massacre to be, "unworthy Dominicans", and, "enemies of the fatherland". According to Espaillat's biographer Leslie Monsour, Brache and his nephew, Espaillat's father, knew that they, "would face a dire punishment – at best imprisonment – and the lives of other members of the family would be endangered if the two men returned to their country." By that time, however, "reports of Trujillo's oppression and brutality had reached international notoriety", and the United States Federal Government willingly granted political asylum to Rafael Brache, his nephew, and their dependents. Both men