How a simple question about American hotels led to ‘the greatest immigration story never told’

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN

Little kids line up in white graduation caps and gowns. Family members pose for formal photos at a wedding. Cousins laugh as they cut into the frosting of a giant birthday cake.

These scenes from Amar Shah’s childhood flash across the screen in a new film. And they share something in common.

All the photos were taken at motels owned by Indian immigrant families.

Shah grew up in that world.

His parents were in the gas station business. Family members and close friends owned motels. But Shah didn’t want to follow in their footsteps.

“I saw it as rough, blue-collar work,” he says, “and I felt a little embarrassed by it.”

But now Shah, 45, says he sees things differently. And he’s hoping others will, too.

A new short film he co-directed and narrates, “The Patel Motel Story,” premiered at New York’s Tribeca Festival in June. And this month, it’s showing at festivals across the US.

The film begins with what Shah calls a “mind-blowing” detail about Indian immigrants and their descendants: “We control over 60% of hotels and motels in the US — from the roadside motels all the way up to the Four Seasons — even though we’re just 1% of the population.”

The motels that were a constant backdrop of his childhood are part of something much larger than he’d realized as a kid.

“My relatives in Central Florida who stayed back to run the motels weren’t stuck,” Shah says. “They were quietly building real estate empires.”

Shah says the filmmaking team set out to answer a simple question: “How did all of this begin?”

The answer they found was surprising.

A ‘counter kid’ returns to his roots

A press kit promoting the film makes an eye-catching point: “The biggest name in the hotel business isn’t Hilton, Marriott, or even Ritz — it’s Patel.” The filmmakers call it “the greatest immigration story never told.”

The Asian American Hotel Association reports that more than 33,000 hotels and motels owned by its members create millions of jobs and generate billions of dollars in revenue every year.

Indian Americans’ role in the hotel industry isn’t a totally unknown story. The phenomenon has been studied by scholars. It’s been a plot point in movies and a recent audio book. And it’s gotten a shout-out in comedian Hasan Minhaj’s standup routine.

“Have you ever noticed that every motel you’ve ever stayed at are all owned by Indian people? Look at the name tag: ‘Patel.’ They’re all from one part of India, and they’re all related,” Minhaj quipped in his 2022 Netflix special.

The joke overstated things slightly, as Shah notes in his “Patel Motel Story” narration (“They’re not all related, and they don’t even have the same name”).

But many hotel owners do hail from India’s Gujarat state. And many share the last name Patel, a common surname in the region.

Even as the topic has gotten more attention, it’s still not a lesson commonly taught in American history textbooks. And Shah and his fellow filmmakers say they realized there was more to the story that deserved to be told.

“We learned about the Mayflower. … All through our lives, we learned how every other piece of America has gotten here, but we never heard our own parents’ stories,” says Milan Chakraborty, one of the film’s producers.

Making the film, Shah says, has been a deeply personal journey.

Shah’s family also came to the US from Gujarat. He grew up as a self-described “counter kid,” helping out while doing his homework at his parents’ gas station convenience store in DeLand, Florida.

The “counter kid” scene, he says, was closely intertwined with the world of “hotel kids,” the children of hotel owners who came of age answering phones, greeting guests and cleaning rooms alongside their families.

Once it was time for him to choose his own career path, Shah moved in a different direction. He studied journalism in college and became a television writer and producer for ESPN, then went on to work for the NFL and numerous other companies and sports teams.

It was only recently that he looked back on his own biography as he searched for stories to tell.

“As you get older, you start to see it differently. You understand the sacrifices and the grit it took for that generation to build a life for us,” Shah says.

And as he tried to trace the origin of Indian Americans’ dominance in the hotel industry, Shah turned to a connection from his past.

Looking for clues at ‘the Super Bowl of hospitality’

A family friend helped show him around the halls of AAHOACON, the owners’ association’s annual convention.

“It’s like the Super Bowl of hospitality,” Shah says, comparing the event to a cross between a massive trade show and an Indian wedding. The group and its nearly 20,000 members have become so influential that top politicians from both sides of the aisle have given speeches at the conference.

Shah, co-director Rahul Rohatgi and Chakraborty went to the Dallas convention in 2021, hoping to make connections for their project.

And it wasn’t long before they met dozens of hotel owners – all with a story to tell.

But a central mystery remained: How did this entrepreneurial success story begin?

Clues started to emerge from interviews as they met more people, Rohatgi says. But still, connecting the dots was difficult.

“It was a lot of work for us to try to dig through and figure out … who has the right lead,” he says.

A historian in California helped them find a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The filmmakers learned that Mahendra K. Doshi, a longtime journalist, was meticulously documenting the stories of hotel-owning families in his book, “Surat to San Francisco: How the Patels from Gujarat Established the Hotel Business in California, 1942-1960.”

“He’d spent eight years working on this amazing biography of all of these forgotten people,” Shah says.

One of the focal points of Doshi’s book was a man whose name the filmmakers had previously seen mentioned in passing: Kanji Manchhu Desai. While other accounts had described Desai’s role, Doshi’s research painted a far more detailed picture.

From Doshi, the filmmakers soon learned that the man who’s come to be known as the godfather of Indian-owned hotels in the US had an unexpected backstory.

How one man helped a generation of immigrants find their way

Desai was originally from Gujarat. But he came to the US in 1934 from Trinidad, where he’d worked for years as a peddler before setting out for a better job.

He obtained a business visa to enter the US, according to Doshi, but then stayed long after the visa expired, becoming an undocumented immigrant who found work in the fields of California and later, according to Doshi, becoming “the first Patel hotelier.”

When the Japanese American owner of a hotel where he was staying in Sacramento, California, was forced to move to an internment camp during World War II, she asked Desai and his friends to watch over her property.

Desai embraced the role “with energy and enthusiasm,” Doshi writes, manning the front desk “while his friends helped him with the daily hotel chores.”

And after the war, Desai leased his own hotel in San Francisco, the Hotel Goldfield. There, he welcomed many a newly arrived immigrant and became known for advice he frequently offered to others from his home state: “If you’re a Patel, lease a hotel.”

Doshi’s research gave the filmmakers the foundation they were looking for. From there, they went on to interview descendants of numerous families who Desai helped.

Something struck Shah as he learned more about Desai’s story.

“As I began to talk to people he directly helped and their kin, it showed how big of a role this man played in this huge billion-dollar story,” Shah says. “Yet he was this sort of forgotten undocumented immigrant.”

A letter of encouragement led her family to the hotel business

Jyoti Sarolia’s family was among many that received Desai’s advice. Her great uncles came to the US from India in 1952.

Before they set sail, Desai had written to them, telling them about hotels in America.

“He would write a letter saying, ‘This place is great for business. It’s a new opportunity. I think you can settle here,’” Sarolia says.

After families like hers arrived, Desai provided them with housing in his San Francisco hotel and sometimes handshake loans to help finance their first hotel leases.

“Now, if you got our family together that’s in the hotel business, there’s 400 of us. We’re in four generations deep now,” she says.

In “The Patel Motel Story,” Sarolia gives a glimpse of what it was like growing up in the hotel world: “I remember answering my first phone when I was 9. By 11, I was putting pillowcases in beds. By 14, I was able to run a hotel by myself.”

It was hard work, but also a lot of fun, she told CNN.

“You felt like you had a mansion – all these corridors and extra rooms,” she says. “It was our playground. We were playing hide and seek and tag. I learned how to ride a bike in the hallway.”

Now more than 70 years after Desai’s encouragement first helped her family find their footing, Sarolia is running a company with eight hotels in its portfolio. The management company’s name is Ellis Hospitality Group, named for Ellis Island, the famed port where her great uncles and millions of other immigrants took their first steps in America.

Their search for stories isn’t over

Sarolia’s perspective is one of several that viewers of “The Patel Motel Story” will hear as they watch the film at festivals this month in Orlando, Seattle, San Francisco and New Orleans.

This film largely focuses on Desai’s story – including a tragic twist at the end of his life.

But the filmmakers hope more Indian American hotel owners will contact them after hearing about the project.

“Our parents’ generation is getting older, and we need to remember their stories,” Shah says. “And their stories are actually far more extraordinary than we ever thought they could be.”

What’s next?

Maybe a docuseries, or maybe even a feature film.

One thing is clear: There are many more stories to tell.

As the credits roll, the short film nods to that possibility, presenting a series of clips of different hotel owners proudly introducing themselves to the audience.

Some have southern drawls. One wears a cowboy hat. All of them are American. And all of them are named Patel.

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