Exploring Nepantla: A Coming of Conocimiento Story about Cultivating Creative Capital in Film School

• In Event: Exploring Creativity as Community Cultural Wealth, In and Beyond the Classroom

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper presents a Coming of Conocimiento story, (a play on the coming-of-age genre) that draws on Gloria Anzaldua’s epistemological concept of conocimiento, “searching, inquiring, and healing consciousness,” to explore how creativity is reclaimed by film students who have experienced epistemic marginalization (2015, p. 19). Beginning with a theoretical grounding of creativity in the context of community cultural wealth (CCW) (2005), this paper offers a cinematic critical race composite counterstory (CCRCC) (Author, 2024) where characters based on MFA film students, stand between worlds as they build and harness creative capital as filmmakers and as students.

Theory and Methods:
In a discipline that demands creativity, film students from underrepresented backgrounds paradoxically struggle to bring their lived experiences and authentic voices to film school environments. With a theoretical and methodological grounding in cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998), this paper draws on the lived experiences, professional experiences, relevant literature, and an emphasis on reciprocity, to co-create a narrative reclaiming of creativity in film school. This process culminates in a composite counterstory in the form of a film screenplay. Seven life history interviews with Women and Femmes of Color were coded using in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2015) , and theoretical coding (Saldaña, 2015) using a CCW framework (Yosso, 2005). Collaborators, well versed in storytelling techniques, retold film school experiences that shaped their creativity, sometimes in ways that forced an epistemic assimilation to deficit narratives.

Words try me—work me as though I am caught in a moment of spirit possession where forces beyond my control inhabit and take me, sometimes against my will, to places, landscapes of thoughts and ideas, I never wanted to journey to or see” (hooks, 1995, p. 125).
An interpretation of bell hooks words might offer an understanding of the creative process—perhaps not always an enjoyable part, but nonetheless, often true. For research collaborators in this study, a journey into reclaiming creative agency takes their fictional characters to difficult terrains indeed, but it also takes them to places reimagined with radical care, where they can be the whole of who they want to be.

Findings
Through narrative analysis of stories related to creativity, two key findings were identified across collaborators. 1) the epistemic paradoxes of a film school pedagogy that mirrors the film industry, and 2) the importance of prioritizing collaboration over competition in the face of individualistic praxis. These findings are storied in fictional film school settings to offer pedagogical reimaginings.

Scholarly Significance
This paper answers a call for “A Pedagogy of Reparations” (Iyer, 2022), which asks film studies educators to move beyond “diversifying” curriculum and syllabi, towards decolonization. Usha Iyer makes the argument that diversity efforts that merely include a single addition of a “diverse” perspective reproduce the marginalization these efforts are meant to combat. Towards decolonization, this paper rejects notions of objectivity to foreground the pedagogical strength of subjectivity and disrupts hierarchical structures of knowledge production, by presenting contributions in screenplay format, a language that is familiar to the study’s research collaborators, positioning them as co-constructors of meaning.

Author

• Brenda Y. Lopez, California State University - Fullerton