The Possibility of Community: How Indian American Motel Owners Negotiate Competition and Solidarity

An asian indian american owner of an economy motel, Ram,¹ explained his decision to move his family from Toronto, Ontario, to Lima, Ohio, an isolated city in the western part of the state:

Here we are immigrants. One day here, second day there, and third day there. We cannot live life like Americans. We come for the money. Where you are getting more money, you go there. Why move from Toronto and lose my [social] circles? I can make more money here. This is a borrowed country.²

I start with this quote to frame his and other immigrants’ decisions to live apart from other, larger migrant communities in the diaspora as a function of free-market business competition that has an excessive burden on immigrants. This second, internal migration to a small midwestern city is a continuation of the first, that of leaving one’s homeland and moving increasingly farther away from coethnics. Despite “coming for the money,” immigrants still yearn for a social and cultural solidarity with one another. How do ethnic minorities build a community when with relatively fewer coethnics, namely in Ohio?

It is ironic that research on displaced groups has been conducted predominantly in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, such as New York City, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where immigrants can be most in touch with their ethnic community. Studies conducted in less-common areas often defend their choice of geography by arguing that more immigrants live there than typically assumed, which makes such places worth studying. I want to begin with the opposite point of departure, that it is important to consider a group because they are not in large numbers. How do people with limited options for coethnic ties create ethnic solidarity? How do such people inform our understandings of space and group dynamics?

I have been conducting fieldwork on Indian American motel owners and their families since 2005, mostly in Ohio. Indian Americans own approximately 50 percent of the motels in the country.³ This is one of the largest ethnic enterprises in the nation’s history. Indian Americans own motels in all corners of the nation. Despite these trends, hardly any scholarship has concentrated on them.

This research asks how immigrants form a sense of ethnic community when their most available peers are their business competition—namely, coethnic motel owners. Community stems from a combination of a shared moral order and sustained social capital within communal gathering spaces or events.⁴ A shared moral order refers to a mutual set of interests and values among members. A common ethnic background, in particular in the diaspora, can provide such a moral order and allow for social capital with one another (while recognizing internal group divisions, discussed below). Yet both the relatively small Indian American population in Ohio and owners’ competitive relationships with one another threatened a solidarity. This article explains how Indian American motel owners formed community despite these structural impediments: through looking for coethnics outside of their immediate area and through finding ritualistic means to create cohesion with local rivals that allowed for, rather than tried to erase, their business competition. Ultimately, owners created a sense of belonging with fellow Indian Americans by relying on the assumption of strong intra-ethnic ties rather than on always demonstrated ones, which I refer to as the “possibility of community.” These trends inform how immigrant communities work in larger areas. Immigrant communities stretch farther than typically imagined but still can be limited in their potential.

Ethnic Communities as Either/Or

Despite being a core analytical concept within studies of immigration, how situated communities actually work remains undertheorized. Two major assumptions have shaped analyses of immigrant communities, each based on an “either/or” framing. First, communities are assumed to be either easily accessible and large or practically nonexistent. Second, if available, they are considered either supportive or exploitative.

Regarding the first assumption, research documenting local ethnic camaraderie takes for granted that many coethnics live in close proximity to one another, which makes a solidarity easy to form. The site...