The Story

Every year, thousands of South-Asian Americans travel to a major U.S. city to network and celebrate. It’s AAHOACON: the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association Convention – the “Super Bowl of Hospitality.” Each attendee owns or manages a hotel or motel, or hundreds of them. And if you walk through the convention center floor, join a networking cocktail, or pick up a brochure to become a Marriott franchisee, you’ll see the same name over and over and over again: Patel. No, this is not a family reunion, and it’s not a family empire (like Marriott).

So how did all these “Patels” get here? Who are they? There’s no long history in India of hotel ownership – in other words, none of these folks came from hotel-owning families or started off with hotel empires in India. So how did this come to be? That a relatively small group of immigrants from one corner of a country halfway around the world, with no background in hospitality, come to be the single largest ethnic group in the US hotel business. And of all the Indian diaspora – Why the Patels?

They are the literal and spiritual descendants of three Gujaratis who escaped British-ruled India during World War II and found themselves with few opportunities once they arrived in America.

With exclusive rights to the recently published “Surat to San Francisco: How the Patels from Gujarat Established the Hotel Business in California,” our film will, for the first time ever, explore how the success of Indian-American hoteliers started in the first place.

Drawing upon a treasure trove of recently discovered interviews, memoirs, and other archival material, “The Patel Motel Story” will give the audience a front-row seat to the difficult journey these immigrants went through, including poverty, loneliness, and discrimination. We will weave these stories with those of current Patel hotel and motel owners to create a compelling portrait of an American entrepreneurial juggernaut in the hospitality industry.

We will also explore themes of immigration, race, class, culture, and identity. We'll challenge the idea of the “model minority.” While popular media portrayed us as selling squishees on “The Simpsons” or eating “monkey brains,” we turned an investment in one motel into a multi-billion dollar industry, and no one even noticed. “The Patel Motel Story” will bring back the forgotten history…and explore what comes next.

Our goal is to create a fresh, urgent, and compelling film with a look and texture that blends east and west, making it uniquely American at heart. This is one of the biggest entrepreneurial stories of our time, which has yet to be told to a broad audience.

South Asians are one of the fastest-growing groups in the United States, with a population of over 5.4 million. Indian Americans alone have a median household income nearly twice the national average and over-index for spending on entertainment and consumer goods.

As their cultural cache has grown over the past decade with the rise of entertainers like Mindy Kaling and Hasan Minhaj, leaders like Kamala Harris, and entrepreneurs like Satya Nadella and Indra Nooyi, South Asians in America are finally having their moment. And the story and trend is global in scope and appeal. Indians now own more land in London than the English themselves. Iconic British car brands like Land Rover are owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata. And for the first time in history, the United Kingdom is led by an Indian man.

It's time to move past Apu and the Kwik-E-Mart (after all, one of our “subjects,” Mehul Patel, owns over 200 hotels and has done over $3 billion in the hospitality business). For us, the image of the South Asian business owner is not just a cartoon. It is personal. Our stories matter. It's time to turn the camera toward our American stories.

- Amar & Rahul, Directors