Little children lined up in white graduation caps and gowns. The family takes formal photos at their wedding. Cousin laughs when he is cut into the matte matte of a giant birthday cake.
These scenes flashing Ama Shah’s childhood from the new film across the screen. And they share something in common.
All photos were taken at a motel owned by an Indian immigrant family.
Shah grew up in that world.
His parents were in the gas station business. Family and close friends owned the motel. But Shah didn’t want to follow in their footsteps.
“I thought it was a rough, blue-collar job,” he says.
But now, Shah, 45, says he sees things differently. And he hopes others do too.
The new short film he co-directed and spoke in collaboration with “The Patel Motel Story” premiered at the Tribecafe Stage in New York in June. And this month it will be on display at festivals across the United States.
The film begins with what Shah calls “surprising” details about Indian immigrants and their descendants. “We control over 60% of hotels and motels in the US.
The motel, which was a constant background to his childhood, is part of something much larger than he noticed as a child.
“My relatives in Central Florida, who came back to run the motel, weren’t stuck,” says Shah. “They were quietly building a real estate empire.”
Shah says the filmmaking team tried to answer a simple question: “How did this all start?”
The answers they found were amazing.
Press kits promoting the film create an eye-catching point. “The biggest names in the hotel business aren’t even Hilton, Marriott, or even Ritz. Patel.” The filmmakers call it “the biggest immigration story that never told me.”
The Asian American Hotel Association reports that over 33,000 hotels and motels owned by its members create millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue each year.
The role of Indian Americans in the hotel industry is not a completely unknown story. This phenomenon has been studied by scholars. It is a plot point for the film and a recent audiobook. And it cried out in comedian Hasan Minhaji’s stand-up routine.
“Have you ever noticed that all the motels you’ve stayed in are owned by people in India? Look at the tag named “Patel.” They are all from parts of India and they are all related,” Minhaj excluded in 2022 Netflix Special.
The joke was slightly exaggerated, as Shah points out in the narration for “Patel Motel Story” (“they aren’t all related and don’t even have the same name”).
However, many hotel owners are from Gujarat, India. And many share the surname Patel, a common surname in the area.
Despite the topic gaining more attention, it is still not a lesson commonly taught in American history textbooks. And Shah and his fellow filmmakers say they realized there is more to the story they deserve to be said.
“We learned about Mayflower. … Throughout our lives we learned how all other America reached here, but we never heard of our own parents,” says Milan Chakraborty, one of the film’s producers.
Making a film was a deep, personal journey.
Shah’s family also came to the US from Gujarat. He grew up as a self-proclaimed “counter kid” and helped out at his parents’ gas station convenience store in Deland, Florida, while doing homework.
He says the “counterkid” scene was closely intertwined with the world of “hotel kids.”
When it was time for him to choose his career path, Shah moved in a different direction. He studied journalism in college, became a television writer and producer for ESPN, and then worked for the NFL and many other companies and sports teams.
It was only recently that he looked back at his own biographies as he searched for a story to tell.
“As you get older, you start to see it differently. You understand the sacrifices and grit that it took for that generation to build lives for us,” says Shah.
And as he tried to trace the origins of Indian-American domination in the hotel industry, Shah turned to his connections from his past.
A family friend helped him show him around the hall of Ahoacon, the Owners Association’s annual convention.
“It’s like a Super Bowl of Hospitality,” says Shah. It compares the event to the intersection of a large fair and an Indian wedding. The group and its nearly 20,000 members are so influential that top politicians from both sides of the aisle spoke at the meeting.
Co-directors Rahul Rohatgi and Chakraborty’s Shah went to the Dallas tournament in 2021, hoping for a connection to the project.
And it didn’t take long for them to meet dozens of hotel owners – there’s all a story to talk about.
But a central mystery remained: how did this entrepreneur’s success story begin?
As they met more people, clues began to emerge from the interviews. But even so, connecting the dots was difficult.
“It was a lot of work for us to dig deeper and try to understand… who has the right lead,” he says.
California historians have helped them find an important part of the puzzle.
The filmmaker learned that longtime journalist Mahendra K. Dosi meticulously documented the story of a hotel-owned family in his book “From Surat to San Francisco: How Patels of Gujarat established a hotel business in California.”
“He worked for eight years in this incredible biographies of all these forgotten people,” says Shah.
One of the focuses of Doshi’s book was a man’s name, a name that was mentioned in the filmmaker’s previous death. Other accounts explained the role of Desai, but Dosai’s research painted much more detailed pictures.
From Dosi, the filmmaker soon learns that the man who became known as the godfather of an Indian-owned hotel in the United States had an unexpected backstory.
Desai was originally from Gujarat. However, he came to the United States from Trinidad in 1934. There, before he took a better job, he worked as a peddler for many years.
According to Dosi, he obtained a business visa to enter the United States, but later became an undocumented immigrant who stayed on the visa after it expired, finding work in a California field.
When the Japanese-American owner of the hotel he was staying in Sacramento, California was forced to move to a concentration camp during World War II, she asked Desai and his friends to watch over her property.
Desai embraced the role “with energy and enthusiasm.”
And after the war, Desai leased his own hotel to San Francisco, Hotel Goldfield. There he welcomed many newly arrived immigrants and became known for his advice he frequently offered to others from his hometown state. “If you’re Patel, lease the hotel.”
Doshi’s research gave filmmakers the foundation they were looking for. From there, they continued to interview descendants of many families that Desai had helped.
Something struck the Shah as he learned more about the Desai story.
“When I started talking to people he helped directly and their relatives, it showed how big of a role this guy played in this huge multi-billion dollar story,” says Shah. “But he was this kind of unforgettable, undocumented immigrant.”
Jyoti Sarolia’s family was among many who received Desai’s advice. Her great uncle came to the United States from India in 1952.
Before they set sail, Desai wrote to them and talked about hotels in America.
“He’ll write a letter saying, ‘This place is perfect for business. It’s a new opportunity, I think I can settle here,” says Saloria.
After families like her arrived, Desai provided housing to hotels in San Francisco, and sometimes handshake loans to help fund the first hotel lease.
“If you’re bringing our family together into the hotel business, we have 400 people. We’re deep in four generations now,” she says.
“The Patel Motel Story” gives you a glimpse into what Sarolia grew up in the hotel world. “I remember answering my first call when I was nine.
It was a tough job, but it was a lot of fun, she told CNN.
“It felt like you had a mansion – all these corridors and extra rooms,” she says. “It was our playground. We had hide and seek and tagged. We learned how to ride a bike in the hallway.”
More than 70 years after Desai’s encouragement first helped her family find their footing, Saloria runs a company with eight hotels in its portfolio. The management company is named after Ellis Hospitality Group, the famous port where her great uncle and millions of other immigrants took their first steps in America.
Saloria’s perspective is one of several things Patel Motel Story viewers hear when they watch movies at festivals in Orlando, Seattle, San Francisco and New Orleans this month.
The film focuses primarily on Desai’s story – with a tragic twist at the end of his life.
However, filmmakers hope that more Indian-American hotel owners will contact them after hearing about the project.
“Our generation of parents are getting older, and we need to remember their stories,” says Shah. “And their stories are actually far more extraordinary than we thought.”
What’s next?
Maybe it’s a docusary, or even a feature film.
One thing is clear. There are more stories.
As the credits roll, the short film nods to the possibility, proudly introducing the audience to a series of clips from various hotel owners.
Some have southern drawls. She’s wearing a cowboy hat. They are all Americans. And all of them are named Patel.
