Jacquelyn Davila

Jacquelyn Davila is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her work engages with the experiences of Indigenous and Hispanic farmers and seeks to address pressing issues of water scarcity and food sovereignty in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Jacquelyn studied History at Princeton University and earned minors in Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, and Translation. Her undergraduate thesis on acequias (communally operated ditches) explored how these systems of shared water management and self-governance prioritized local interests and subsistence farming but presented challenges for American capitalist development in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New Mexico. At Yale, Jacquelyn hopes to expand her explorations of community-based irrigation systems across the American Southwest and northern Mexico, using water as an axis for understanding how communities in these arid, peripheral landscapes have framed their relationships to land, labor, and nation.