How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels
Starting in the 1940s, Indian immigrants built a hospitality industry that their children and grandchildren have turned into an empire.
As a new immigrant to the United States in the early 1970s, Jayantibhai Patel slept very little. By day he held down a job at a bank in San Francisco. By night he toiled in the city’s run-down Tenderloin district at the Vincent Hotel, a property he had acquired not long after moving to the country. Patel’s sleepless nights paid off. By the 1980s he and his two sons were running several motels and hotels in California, and now, four years after Patel’s death, his granddaughters are taking the family business forward. (Read more about the South Asian American experience here.)
The success of Patel and his family mirrors the rise of Indian Americans in the U.S. motel industry.
