If you've seen the movie "Mississippi Masala" then you'll understand why it came to mind when reading about a new book called "Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream." The 1991 movie starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury took place primarily in the motel owned by the Indian (by way of Uganda) parents of the character Choudhury played in the movie. Yet that fictional account is representative of the real world fact that one out of two motels in the U.S. are owned by Indian-Americans. 

Pawan Dhingra, an associate professor of sociology at Oberlin College, is that author of this 254 page non-fiction book.  NPR interviewed the author about his book for the show "All Things Considered."  

In the interview, Dhingra explains how Indian-Americans and more specifically those from the ethnic group, Gujarati, came to become motel owners in such high numbers. "They fell into the hospitality industry by accident. This is at a time in the '40s and '50s when these residential hotels were seen as places that catered to a down-and-out population where there was going to be drugs and alcohol, whatever else going on. European-Americans and the Japanese-Americans who ran those hotels were looking to get out - Japanese-Americans were interned, but even Frenchmen or other European-Americans who had been running them, it's not a lot of money to be made and their kids didn't want to take them over, so no one else wanted to buy these and it was pretty cheap." 

In the book Dhinga also writes of the children of the motel owners who decide to stay in the business. For example, the children of a Bordertown, New Jersey motel owner are all studying at hotel schools at Cornell and New Your University to they can learn, as the book says, to "manage chains of hotels, work in corporate offices of name-brand franchisers, and acquire more upscale properties like Marriott and Hilton."