Entrepreneurs: Legacy of Dreams

(3 of 5)

Education is proving a key tool in grooming the second generation of Indian hoteliers. Unlike, say, the construction business, hospitality is an immigrant-heavy industry with a ready infrastructure of formal training. Over the past five years or so, as a new generation has come of age, students of Indian background have flooded hotel schools like the one at Cornell University. There they learn how to broker acquisitions, arrange complicated financing, set up room-booking technology and modernize marketing. Many take internships and first jobs in related fields like real estate or investment banking. The training helps "prepare them to take on an industry vastly more competitive and complex than when their parents entered it," says Cornell professor Chekitan Dev.

The new generation of Indian-American hotel owners is also learning, sometimes the hard way, how to play politics. After Sept. 11, ethnic-Indian proprietors suffered a wave of xenophobia, exhibited by signs outside competing hotels that claimed AMERICAN OWNED AND OPERATED. The bias cut into bookings, hurting business in an already devastating climate for travel. Yet while major hotel corporations lobbied for and received relief from Washington, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association had no presence or influence there to follow suit. "We learned from that," says Naresh (Nash) Patel, 38, current chairman of the association and a second-generation hotel owner. The group swiftly launched lobbying efforts and invited politicians like Newt Gingrich to speak at its gatherings. It set up a nationwide program to provide free hotel rooms for families of active military members on leave. Nash Patel called the owner of a Florida hotel with an offending sign. The owner took it down.

In some cases, the children of immigrants, thanks to education and experience, are leaving hard labor behind for good. Mexican workers in California's wine country have been preparing for generations to face their unique challenge: trading grape-stained work gloves for ownership papers. Since the 1940s, millions of Mexicans have traveled across the border to work the California vineyards. Those economics haven't changed in what is now the $33 billion U.S. wine capital. During harvest, Napa County is home to up to 2,700 migrant workers, most from Mexico. For as much as $15 an hour, the workers endure 18-hour days of backbreaking labor, often with no benefits or job security. "Without the Mexican labor force, there wouldn't be a wine industry," says Amelia Ceja, 48. Her children were to the vineyard born, all right--to migrant workers. Their grandparents toiled in the fields for $1 a day. Amelia met her husband Pedro while picking grapes at age 12. The family bought its first 15 acres, outside Napa, in 1983. By 1999, it owned 113 acres. Today Ceja Vineyards provides grapes for well-known brands in addition to its own labels. The company now produces 5,000 cases of wine annually, compared with just 750 in 2001. The Ceja children study at local universities and will inherit vineyards, not dreams.