[2] Jaramillo spent her childhood in Los Angeles and often traveled during the summers to her grandparents' turkey ranch in California's Imperial Valley.
[4] While in high school, she met and eventually began dating fellow art student Daniel LaRue Johnson.
[3] Many of the artworks she produced during this time were painted on student-grade canvases stretched over wood that her father had procured, a result of there being no art stores in her neighborhood to purchase higher quality materials.
[8] Although Jaramillo and Johnson only lived in Paris for a year, her time in the city had a significant impact on her: "It changed the way I looked at things and it kind of zipped open my brain.
[10] Jaramillo's art has been primarily concerned with materials, and she states that "partly fuelled by her Mexican-American heritage," her "personal and artistic life has been a political statement.
The De Luxe Show was one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States"[12] and included artists such as Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
[14] Solo exhibitions were held at the Douglas Drake Gallery in Kansas City, and the Soho Center for Visual Artists in 1976.