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. 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 in National Geographic’s full article.
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