Like the passport of a well-traveled guest, this tale weaves worldwide as it tells the story of resourceful immigrants from a remarkable community.
By Amy Drew Thompson
Amar Shah is a first-generation American whose view of the nation was formed through the lens of the industries in which his family worked. One of them was hospitality.
His parents’ closest friends owned a motel. Their family lived there, too. One moment in the small apartments where meals were cooked, where homework was done, where life happened – the next behind the front desk, checking-in guests, sweeping parking lots, cleaning bathrooms.
“I became very familiar with the ebb and flow of that world,” Shah said.
But neither his parents’ convenience store world, nor that of motels, would become his story. Instead, Shah forged a path in communications and media.
And eventually, he would realize that the story he’d always wanted to tell – as his resume wound its way through owning his own production company in Los Angeles and working in pro sports before finding its way back to hospitality – was much more than something that was organic to his own life.
It was “the greatest immigrant story never told.” Was.
The Patel Motel Story, a 13-minute short film by Shah and his co-director Rahul Rohatgi, debuted this month at New York City’s esteemed Tribeca Film Festival, selected from among more than 8,000 submissions.
It is moving and inspirational. It is also remarkable. For beyond the hard work of the families who since the 1940s have built a hospitality empire – one worth $370 billion and that employs 4 million people – the circumstances that aligned like stars to make it possible are seemingly impossible.
It all began with a single Gujarati immigrant with a fourth-grade education who left his family behind, struggled for several years in Trinidad, then managed to find his way to America. He entered undocumented and nearly worked himself to death as a farm laborer in California before the onset of World War II bestowed upon him an opportunity….
But Shah would learn about this man, Kanji Manchu, much later.
His movie idea was first reignited in 1999 by a story he read in The New York Times Magazine called “A Patel Motel Cartel?”
“It was all about how Indians, people who came from the same part of India as my family, had come to dominate the hotel and motel world,” he said. “I had no idea… but I knew that growing up in it allowed so many different Indian-Americans to see the world uniquely. Whether in areas you’d never think they’d be in – rural areas in Texas or Nevada or North Dakota or in the Northeast – there was always a Patel motel around.”
In pursuit of the story, Shah continued to peel the layers back, along the way finding allies in AAHOA.
“The association has been so great in terms of opening doors for us to speak with hotel owners and members, giving us carte blanche to talk to people and capture the stories,” he said. “They were constantly encouraging us. They were excited.”
Indeed, the culmination of the film – an amalgam of several years’ worth of AAHOACON footage – showcases not only the industry’s remarkable (and smile-worthy) depth of “Patelness,” but the overall zeal with which members participate.
It was through Rupesh Patel, an Orlando-based AAHOA Member “and big influencer in the Patel motel space,” according to Shah, that many connections were made and thusly, exceptional stories captured in the film. Those include the stories of Jyoti Patel Sarolia, who alongside her family operates properties in San Francisco, and Hiren Patel of El Paso, TX, whose parents’ property was home to three generations of their family, all of whom worked there, as well.
Later, Shah discovered the work of San Jose journalist Mahendra Doshi, a Gujarat native, who wrote the book Surat to San Francisco: How the Patels from Gujarat Established the Hotel Business in California.
It was here where Shah learned the story of Kanji Manchu, the missing piece to the puzzle, the godfather of the Patel motel legacy.
“[Doshi] had spent seven or eight years chronicling the story,” said Shah, who hired artists and animators to bring Manchu’s worldwide adventure to life.
The book was optioned. Doshi served as a consultant on the film, an historian in it.
And through the AAHOA connection, the vast puzzle came together as Shah and his co-director met members whose parents and grandparents had direct connections with Manchu and his generosity, whose own family fortunes had been built on the grace and trust of a no-interest handshake loan.
“We were able to tap into this Gujarati network of people,” he said, “and tell a story in a very synced way that is all at once very satisfying but also leaves you wanting more.”
He likens it, in fact, to a thali.
“You have all these different dishes, but everything feels like it’s homemade,” he said of the film, in which a San Francisco stroll with Patel Sarolia becomes a walking tour of where so much of the Patel motel story began, in which interviews with many of the original Patel kids tell the stories of how they grew up – both the joys and the challenges.
“Our hotels became Ellis Island for a lot of us,” Patel Sarolia told Shah. “Although one person came first, other people came, stayed a little bit ‘til they got their own [hotel], and they worked hard to get their businesses.”
It taps into the resilience so many of these immigrants had, said Shah, in particular the stories of Manchu and his two friends from India, who spent years in other countries just trying to get here.
“America was their El Dorado,” Shah said. “And one of the things I love the most is that it’s about what compels people to come here, despite the obstacles they faced in terms of racism and discrimination and use opportunities and happenstance in their own communities to create something incredibly special.”
From the 30 Patel families who, with Manchu’s help, entered the realm of the American hospitality industry between the years of 1949 and 1952 came the families who now control more than 60 percent of the hotels and motels in the United States.
“It’s mind blowing,” he said in the film.
It is. And it’s a story that the film, hopefully, can connect to subsequent generations, Patel and otherwise, who are less directly connected to their immigrant forebears.
“So many people forget their roots. They forget how it all happened. They take it for granted,” said Shah, whose father landed in the U.S. as a 17-year-old student in the late ‘60s and whose mom came later, in 1975, at age 19. Shah was born in New Jersey in 1980. He now has kids of his own.
“So many different Patels who know this story are thankful that this generation is learning it…. It’s a reminder of how hard it was and how important it is to remember the people who came before you and the sacrifices they made.”
It’s remarkable, almost unbelievable, he said, that this story even happened.
And as the film traces it – this immigration story, this story of the American Dream, this history of one of the nation’s biggest, most vital industries – it brings together past and present while looking ahead, toward the future.
“It showcases that the hospitality industry would not be where it is without the contributions of the Indian-American community,” Shah said.
Image: Courtesy of Jyoti Patel Sarolia
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