While American hotels cater to various urban needs, their locations and facilities scarcely fit automobile-driven families exploring continental highways. Early travelers found lodgings in camp-sites, tourist homes and hastily constructed rooms. The name “motel,” contracting motor and hotel, appeared by 1926, although tourist courts and the smalltown “cottages” also competed as titles. With the wealth and highways of postwar America, many low-slung modernist L-shaped buildings with a carport by the office, a pool and easy access mushroomed nationwide. The interstate highway system eventually moved travelers towards major chains dominating intersections with signs visible for miles before arrival (hence, the isolation of the Bate’s motel in Hitchcock’s Psycho, (1960); by 1962, after decades of building, the US had over 60,000 motels. In the 1950s, public spaces and size expanded along with competition.

Motel owners established linkages through professional associations in the 1930s, followed by recommendation services and referral chains to standardize services among independent motels. Chain ownership was pioneered by the Alamo Plaza chain (founded 1929, with characteristic “Spanish-style” courts). Holiday Inn, begun along Memphis highways in 1952, became the leader in co-ownership franchises, with continually upgraded standards. Howard Johnson’s orangeroofed lodges expanded from a franchise ice-cream family restaurant, while other cheaper chains offer basic standardized facilities beside the offramp. These predictable middle-class lodgings relegated older motels to marginal positions for poorer travelers, immigrant housing and illegal activities— prostitution or illicit sex (meanings intensified by their representations in television and movies).

The economic crisis among the aging owners of “mom-and-pop” motels nonetheless created a unique opportunity for immigrant entrepreneurship in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ethnic entrepreneurship was not especially associated with older hotels, although Basque-run hotels of the West created a special niche and Taiwanese have developed new complexes in suburban Los Angeles, CA. Yet, by 1999, more than 50 percent of all American motels were owned by South Asians, generally members of a Gujarati Hindu sub-caste, either immigrants from India or displaced Indians from Uganda (portrayed in Mississippi Masala, 1992). These do not serve an ethnic clientele as much as they represent a fortuitous association now sustained by ethnic ownership and trade associations.

As analysts argue, though, hotels and motels are not just about travel but about cultural ideals of domesticity and family, social distinction and even style, as prepackaged rooms shaped American tastes for the home. They have also been stages where dramas of good and evil—cleanly lit standardized hotels versus sleazy, dangerous dives linked to prostitution, crime or immigration—are played out in media and along the road. The motor hotel, linking rooms and automobiles, has a more clearly American history singularly transformed through contemporary immigration.