Shed Skin is a film exploring cultural assimilation through the passing of Velez Nelms's grandmother, Meme, the matriarch of the family who represented its last generation to speak Spanish. Using archival footage of the Florida Everglades from the Miami Dade College Wolfson Collection, produced by Homer A. Brinkley in 1928, the film draws a poetic parallel between settler-colonial intervention in the South Florida wetlands and the shifting identity of a family long after its migration to the United States.
The wetlands have been shaped by a history of human intervention that reflects the colonial expansion behind this development. Drained, converted into agricultural land, and opened to real-estate development and tourism, the landscape was physically altered while being rebranded as an exotic environment, constructing an image of South Florida and its Indigenous inhabitants for an outside audience. Within the archival footage, reptiles known for shedding their skin become a visual anchor for the film's central tension, where adaptation can offer survival, mobility, and new possibilities while simultaneously raising the question of what must be relinquished in order to belong.
The film details the unfolding development of the region and introduces conversations surrounding the ethnopolitics of the land and the people who inhabited it, showcasing primary letters, documentation, and correspondence from the William Sturtevant Collection at the Smithsonian. These materials document the landscape's development and reveal the political and social structures that shaped it.
The film moves between this landscape and Emily's family history, tracing how her mother's domestic labor cleaning white homes contributed to the family's class ascension while coinciding with an increasing distance from their language, heritage, and origins. The physical effects of prolonged exposure to bleach bring the material act of cleaning into direct relationship with whitening, leading Emily to ask, no matter how many homes we cleaned, had we bleached ourselves?
The promise of advancement within both histories exists alongside the displacement and alteration required to achieve it. The film examines how these structures operate at different scales, from the development of land according to imposed standards of productivity and value to the economic mobility of a family navigating its own expectations of prosperity and belonging.
With Meme's passing, Emily and her family are left to carry a relationship to their heritage without the language that once connected generations of the family. As reptiles shed skin and landscapes are dismantled and reconstructed, Shed Skin considers how adaptation can become indistinguishable from erasure, and how memory and identity are reshaped by the standards of belonging imposed upon them.