Run, Jane, Run!

In the early 1990s, while driving along the 405 Freeway in San Diego, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood became distraught at the sight of an "Immigrant Crossing" sign of parents running with a small child. She identified with the little girl and was shocked at how easily a group of people could be dehumanized. She began depicting this motif threaded with barbed wire, caution tape, and yellow cotton in many of her weavings. The tapestry pays homage to the families killed on the highway and reinforces their humanity. The title, Run, Jane, Run!, references the Dick and Jane reading primers for young children.

Jimenez Underwood has made weavings about immigration at the US-Mexico border for much of her career. Her father was an undocumented field worker in California, and her family regularly crossed the border. She says she wove this tapestry from "the gaze of the Indigenous woman of long ago."