In 1919, Sanborns expanded beyond its modest origins as a U.S.-style drugstore into a modern department store and high-class restaurant. Company owners hired working-class Mexican women to serve the large crowds that visited Sanborns seven days a week from 8:00am to 10:00pm (Anonymous, 1921a). Women catered some of the most powerful people in Mexico City’s upper-class. This included bankers, industrialists, foreign dignitaries, politicians, military officers, intellectuals, journalists, celebrities, and foreign tourists (Anonymous, 1924: 35). The Mexican journalist Agustín Barrios Gómez observed, “there was no important man in Mexico who had not had coffee in Sanborns” (Barrios Gómez, 1994: 5-A). Women workers at Sanborns served as important facilitators that provided the company’s main interaction with visiting customers. Waitresses developed working relationships with their guests, and customers often went to Sanborns specifically to dine in the section of their favorite waitress. As historian Michael Snodgrass observes, having a stable income and job security was important for working women; other jobs within the retail sector probably existed elsewhere, but having a chance to work for a reputable company probably made women workers feel honorable and gave them a sense of pride (Snodgrass, 2003: 75-76). The notoriety of Sanborns may have drawn women to try and work there for their own reasons. The Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa recalled that during the 1920s-1930s, there were ample job opportunities for young women at Sanborns. As a frequent customer who ate breakfast at Sanborns, he remembered women working as counter assistants that were “able to leave their houses and show off their clothes” (Zarebska, 1999: 136).

At Sanborns, a set hierarchy existed in the workspaces that separated unskilled Mexican workers from the company’s upper management. The family-owned business tapped Sanborn relatives to fill top executive positions and hired almost exclusively white Americans as the store managers. Floor supervisors oversaw workers divided within each store department. Men and women held these managerial positions, some of whom were U.S. citizens. However, Sanborns also hired Mexican women as floor supervisors and secretaries, suggesting that some upward mobility in the company was possible. For example, a company brochure from 1939 dedicated a page to the nine store supervisors at Sanborns that included Marie Guzman, Frank Sanborn’s private secretary, and Refugio Muciño, the perfume department manager. Captions for the women highlighted their continued loyalty working at Sanborns; Guzman started in 1921, and Muciño in 1922 (ASH, 1939).

By 1921, Sanborns employed a far greater number of waitresses than any other restaurant in Mexico City. A Department of Labor report from the same year surveyed different restaurants, cantinas, and cafeterias located in seven districts in the capital. The report counted the waitstaff in each establishment and listed if they were unionized or non-unionized laborers. Under the listing for “Restaurant Sanbons’ [sic], the report indicated the company staffed 40 non-unionized waitresses (AGN, DTSICT, 1921a). The government inspector who collected the statistical information used clear gender suffixes to describe the sex of the workers throughout the report. Sanborns employed 20 more waitresses than El Fénix and La Flor de México, two of the leading coffee-houses in the city, and 25 more than Lady Baltimore, a very popular restaurant and ice cream shop located across the street from Sanborns.

The preference that Sanborns management had in hiring working women was, paradoxically, contrary to the labor trends of other major restaurants in Mexico City. Susie S. Porter’s analysis of census records observed that a clear division of labor existed where, “men dominated in service jobs in first-class restaurants, while women worked mostly in second-class restaurants (Porter, 2003: 47)”. The 1921 Department of Labor report reveals only a partial assessment of the number of women who worked at Sanborns. However, the evidence suggests the company hired exclusively non-unionized women to work at waitresses. It can be reasonably assumed that the other working women employed there were also without union protections.

Without the strength of organized labor and with limited mobility to climb upwards into higher positions at the company, working women at Sanborns faced uncertainties and precarity at their jobs. Article 123 of the Mexico’s 1917 Constitution outlined certain labor protections, like the “right to dignified and socially useful employment” that permitted workers to organize unions and occasionally go on strike. Article 123 also stipulated a minimum wage sufficient for a laborer to support a family, a day of rest per week, and 20 days of paid vacations per year (Weis, 2012: 110). Yet, for working women at Sanborns, the boundaries between their rights as workers and their everyday working conditions were nonaligned. It remains unclear whether working women received any form of non-wage benefits for their continued employment and acquiescence to the company’s labor paternalism. Women who performed well at their jobs were rewarded by their managers with continued employment. They demonstrated their loyalty through their dedicated service to the company, and by accepting their subordination to their superiors. However, women were also disciplined based on these same virtues by managers who controlled their position, movement, and right to work. Thus, working women at Sanborns were required to either accept or reject the company’s paternalism and the gendered hierarchy that subjected them (Anonymous, 1921b).

On June 16, 1921, the Department of Labor wrote a memorandum to Sanborns warning that their labor policies could potentially incite tensions among their workers. The document reported that the company’s labor contracts were “not acceptable” because they infringed on part 22 of Article 123. That particular subsection required companies who dismissed workers without justification to pay indemnity for three months of wages. The Department of Labor learned that Sanborns was in violation of the labor law, suggesting that certain employees may have petitioned directly to the government. The memorandum stated that company owners at Sanborns did have the power to dismiss their employees without justification, if necessary, but were bound to fulfill their labor contracts they had signed or provide the required 90-days of wages. The letter forwarded to the company asserted that Sanborns was actively “trying to avoid compliance with some of the constitutional precepts that favor the labor class” and said that the policy itself “could create a feeling of hostility” which could lead to potential labor conflicts (AGN, DTSICT, 1921b). A few days later, company owners responded to the government, writing that their “objective is not to violate the laws, nor harass our employees; we only want to avoid difficulties and damages (AGN, DTSICT, 1921c)”. The terse response indicated that Sanborns at least acknowledged the government’s position and understood that the labor contract they signed with employees required them to abide to Mexican law.

The Department of Labor memorandum suggests that Sanborns employees worked in a potentially precarious labor environment. Working women at Sanborns were especially vulnerable considering their employer was a foreign merchant that ran a business not considered a strategic industry (Lear, 2001: 229). Working women at Sanborns may have lacked guarantees of future employment and risked losing their jobs all together without warning or justification, and that they might not receive their 90-day severance as required by Article 123 of the 1917 Constitution. Evidence shows that even if employees went and filed lawsuits against Sanborns, the company hired powerful lawyers that defended themselves against any litigation in the Mexican court system (AGN, TSJDF, 1918). The Department of Labor’s warning to Sanborns foreshadowed a large-scale labor protest involving Mexican bakers that occurred exactly a year after the memorandum was written.

In the 1920s, Sanborns was surrounded by protracted labor conflicts and political turmoil that engulfed downtown Mexico City. Sanborns and its location inside the land-mark House of Tiles became a focal point for social criticism that revealed tensions concerning its close association with U.S. capitalism and exclusive appeal to Mexican elites. After all, the House of Tiles once headquarters the Casa de Obrero Mundial, (House of World Workers), an anarcho-syndicalist group that promoted the rights of workers (Lear, 2001: 233). The tense political landscape of Mexico City somehow did not seriously impact the Sanborns business. Evidence shows that the Sanborn brothers attempted to create a retail environment free from the revolutionary politics that surrounded the store. The owners forbade Sanborns employees from talking about politics and apparently the same policy applied to guests who entered the store (Scully, 1942: 10).

On June 16, 1922, telephone operators, textile workers, streetcar workers, electricians, and candymakers, marched in solidarity with a large group of striking bakers in downtown Mexico City (Anonymous, 1922b). The workers had recently left the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) and formed the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) (Weis, 2012: 115-116). The large cross segment of striking workers were an emblematic display of the continued labor struggles and class negotiation that took place after the Mexican Revolution (Weis, 2009). The protests were part of a lengthy labor battle that pitted business owners backed by the police against radicalized bread workers who demanded higher wages, shorter shifts, and medical benefits (Weis, 2012). The strikes disrupted non-unionized establishments, and temporarily paralyzed the city.

At approximately 3:30pm, a group of fifty male bakers entered Sanborns in the House of Tiles and unfurled red and black strike flags. They deliberately entered Sanborns during the busy lunch hour, when the salon was likely packed with aristocratic guests. The protestors demanded that female waitresses, cooks, and kitchen assistants abandon their posts, walk of the job, and join the ongoing strike. Panic erupted among the dining customers who fled Sanborns thinking that the protestors were part of an ongoing rebellion. The bakers moved through the dining salon towards the kitchen and tried removing the female bakers working there (Anonymous, 1922a). Sanborns managers immediately called the police. The New York Times reported that a police squadron armed with rifles arrived, surrounded Sanborns, and were given orders to disburse the unruly crowd. It was reported that Celestino Gasca, Mexico City’s governor, gave the police permission to shoot the bakers in the event of widespread disorder (Anonymous, 1922e: 2). The New York Times report was not hyperbole. In 1922, two separate incidents involving armed police and striking workers resulted in the shooting deaths of at least one police officer and a bakery worker. According to the newspaper La Raza, the police intervention at Sanborns was necessary to “pacify” the “somewhat militant” attitude of the protestors who had succeeded in temporarily halting work production inside Sanborns, and two other well-known cafeterias and pastry shops in the capital (Anonymous, 1922d: 5). The police eventually cleared out Sanborns without major incident using the threat of force.

This incident does not appear within the larger narrative of working-class labor struggles that took place in Mexico City. However, it nevertheless brought into focus the labor practice of Sanborns. The striking bakers and their organizers entered Sanborns because they knew the institution deliberately hired non-unionized female workers. In Mexico City, bakeries were predominantly masculine workspaces. Census records from 1922 reveal that of the 44 bakers located in the capital, each establishment employed on average about 22 male bakers, and only 10 bakeries hired any women workers at all. The average maximum daily salary of a male bread worker was $7.00 pesos for a nine-hour workday (AGN, 1922). To put that into perspective, in 1922, the price of a Sanborns commercial lunch cost $2.00 pesos (ASH, 1922). The scant statistical evidence available on female bakery workers shows they made significantly less money compared to their male counterparts. On average, women earned less than $3.00 a day with the minimum salary close to $1.67 (AGN, 1922). What is interesting is that Sanborns managers did not consider their store a bakery, even though they produced cakes and pastries (Anonymous, 1922c), nor did Government inspectors include Sanborns in their 1922 census report of bakeries operating in Mexico City.

The striking male bakers likely perceived Sanborns’s paternalism as a threat to their own individual livelihoods. Sanborns directors deliberately instituted a labor system that preferentially hired non-unionized working-women. Women workers earned less wages than men and their lack of affiliation with outside labor movements meant they were easier to control. Their labor position was further weakened under Sanborns’s gendered hierarchy of U.S. managers, and by the fact their employer was a foreign merchant not considered in a strategic industry (Lear, 2001: 229). This hiring practice was likely implemented as a defensive measure to insulate the family-owned U.S. company from the wave of revolutionary labor movements that surrounded Mexico City (Snodgrass, 2003: 54-62).

The protesting bakers also entered Sanborns because they knew the store held important social significance as an institution that catered exclusively for Mexico City’s powerful upper-class. They used the store as a stage to symbolically contest a public site of power and bring attention to larger systematic labor struggles. The public demonstration followed the precedent established by labor movements during the Mexico Revolution, that attempted to reclaim spaces for the working-class inside Mexico City’s opulent downtown neighborhood (Lear, 2001: 233). As Excélsior noted, the decision to protest in Sanborns, “made the scandal much bigger and vastly exaggerated its significance (Anonymous, 1922a)”.

From the moment that Sanborns moved into the House of Tiles, the uniforms worn by Sanborns waitresses became important visual markers used by social commentators to describe the boundaries separating the gender, class, and race positions between upper-class guests and the working-women who served them. In 1919, the Mexican writer Armando de Maria y Campos described Sanborns as a “lordly mansion” filled with distinguished guests packed together in cloth-lined booths being served by young Sanborns waitresses. “In the midst of the atmosphere of originality and good taste, it is shocking that the lady waitresses are uniformed in those insipid and discolored gowns”, he said. De Maria y Campos joked that Sanborns managers should instead dress them like pajecillos (servants for the king), “with stockings striped with red or white, gold or green, and colorful wigs” (de María y Campos, 1919). In 1924, Salvador Novo lamented his displeasure for some of the physical changes that Sanborns made to the House of Tiles. He deplored the addition of a glass ceiling, the chessboard floor tiles, the paintings of peacocks on the walls, and the “wet nurse uniforms of those who serve us the medicinal ice creams” (Novo, 1924: 33). These forms of social criticism linked the presence and physical appearance of working-class female employees among the scenery and the modernist transformations found inside the store. They also show that the uniforms worn by Sanborns waitresses became identifiable symbols representing the company.

Beginning in the 1930s, Sanborns directors systematically adjusted their business to evolve within Mexico’s changing economic conditions and the intense wave of nationalism that followed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Sanborns directors Mexicanized their stores to increase their customer base beyond local elites and to promote foreign tourism (Chrisman, 2018: 132). Some of the changes made to the stores in Mexico City and Monterrey included Mexican artwork and upholstery, restaurant menu items that featured corn dishes associated with Mexico’s national cuisine, and a redesigned folkloric uniform which mixed together a selected appropriation of gendered clothing worn by indigenous women in Mexico.

According to a Sanborns manager (Gudiño, 2015), inspiration for the new uniforms was drawn from the clothing typically worn by indigenous women in states that were, “the most generally representative of Mexico”. The uniform consisted of three parts that included the huipil de mezcla, the traditional blouse from Puebla, a “modern, bright and comfortable” long striped skirt known as amarres from Oaxaca, and the cap from Nayarit. This highly selective amalgamation of indigenous dress used for the Sanborns uniform shares interesting similarities with the choice of clothing used in other largescale cultural projects of Indigenismo and Mestizaje in postrevolutionary Mexico. As Natasha Varner (2020: 10) shows, this choice of clothing held a set of codes and characteristics that defined what it meant to be an “authentic” indigenous woman.

Photo 1 Source: AGN (s.f.).

Foreign visitors may have recognized the uniforms as tropes representing Mexico’s indigeneity. One U.S. traveler described a scene within the House of Tiles, which contained “a beautiful glassed-in patio, where the waitresses are dressed in picturesque native costumes” (Shorr, 1946). Another account lauded the Sanborn brothers for their “real contribution to Mexican culture”, in having renovated the House of Tiles with the correct columned patio walls, where the “waitresses were uniformed in the gay Tehuantepec Indian costume” (Scully, 1942: 10). Interestingly, the clothing worn by the Tehuantepec were not one of the groups that Sanborns had molded their uniform from, indicating that customers may have interpreted the cultural constructions differently. In Mexico, Rodolfo Usigli’s (2015) classic novel, Ensayo de un Crimen, describes the everyday life of Mexico’s upper-class in the 1940s. In one scene inside Sanborns, the protagonist finds a table in the center of the dining salon where he witnesses a group of waitresses “whispering to each other in their fake aboriginal outfits”. Carlos Fuentes’ novel La cabeza de la hidra (1985) begins with a scene inside Sanborns where the author describes an approaching waitress as “disguised as an Indian”.

The racially loaded words “Indian” and “native” imply a set of interrelated issues involving racial and class connotations associated with Mexico’s poor rural communities. What these above examples have shown is how the Sanborns uniform encoded the bodies of waitresses with a gendered and racialized meaning, one grounded in a romanticized vision of Mexico’s indigenous past.

The addition of the new folkloric uniforms at Sanborns further integrated working women under the company’s paternalism and its gendered labor hierarchy. The uniform further controlled their bodies and reinforced their subordinate race and class positions within their workspace. These new uniforms eventually became standardized and experienced very few alterations over the next 80 years.

In May 1946, the Sanborn brothers sold their company to Walgreens, a U.S. drugstore chain from Deerfield, IL, for $2.5million ($12.500.000 pesos) (Anonymous, 1945: 2). Sanborns was Walgreens first foreign acquisition that followed in the largescale trend of post-war corporate expansion in search of larger consumer markets outside of the United States. Walgreens inherited the control of both Sanborns stores and kept in place many of the business ideas, strategies, and management systems created by the original store owners. As a result of the buyout, workers who were part of the company-controlled Union of Employees of Sanborns Monterrey (UESM) signed a new labor agreement that reportedly raised their salaries 30% and provided other labor concessions (JLCA, AGENL, 1947c). Like most sindicato blancos, or company-controlled unions these labor organizations are almost exclusively oriented towards the position of the company (Vellinga, 1979: 115-116). As a result, not all workers at Sanborns Monterrey felt secure with their labor protections under a company-controlled union. Working women continued to experience tensions with the store manager Mary Williams and the company’s paternalistic labor system. Meanwhile, across Monterrey, intense union activity continued during the mid-1940s that included protests and strikes against foreign-owned companies that gathered massive profits at the expense of declining wages (Snodgrass, 2003: 292-295).

On October 20, 1947, a Sanborns employee named María Luisa Flores visited the office of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board of Nuevo León. María was the Secretary General of UESM. She requested that an official from the arbitration board witness an assembly of female workers at Sanborns. During a meeting held inside the patio of Sanborns Monterrey, a labor official met with 44 women workers and heard several grievances about the mistreatment they experienced from the store’s manager. One woman named Felicitas Blanco reported that when her mother’s illness forced her to miss work, the manager suspended her and replaced her with a new employee. Blanco felt this incident hurt her chances of “climbing the ladder” and advancing in the company (AGENL, JLCA, 1947c).

Social mobility and economic independence were probably the reasons why Blanco sought a job at Sanborns. During the meeting, María Luisa Flores explained that in defending the rights of her workers, she was fired by Williams (AGENL, JLCA, 1947d). The firing of the Secretary General of the company-controlled labor union exposed the virulent anti-labor position of Sanborns managers, and the inherent weakness in collective bargaining within the company union.

Alicia Herrera proposed that the best way of defending themselves and the interests of their jobs was by joining a different union, one that actually provided labor protections for union members. She suggested the Union of Employees of Hotels, Canteens, and Restaurants (UEHCRS), an independent union representing workers across a broad spectrum of establishments and industries in Monterrey. Of the 44 women present during the meeting, 37 voted to enter the independent union. Another four said they would join at a later date. The 44 women represented 40% of Sanborns’s entire workforce (AGENL, JLCA, 1947a). The vote signaled that a significant portion of workers had no confidence in the company-controlled union and felt vulnerable under the company’s paternalistic labor system.

On October 23, 1947, the secretary general of the UEHCRS visited the office of the Central Conciliation and Arbitration Board and presented a strike action against Sanborns Monterrey. The document provided a list of demands by workers that needed to be met before a planned strike set for October 30, 1947. They demanded that Sanborns accept the terms of a new collective bargaining agreement. The petition also stipulated that Sanborns needed to “harmonize” the interests of the company with its workers and offer solidarity with other unions on strike. The union argued that Sanborn offered “meager” salaries to its employees compared to similar restaurants in Monterrey, and that the salaries were insufficient to cover expenses for wage earners and their families. According to the document, wages of the workers should reflect the high economic potential of the company. The union pointed to the company’s “enormous profits” and “the fame enjoyed by the commercial position” as a popular tourist destination. These profits may have benefited Sanborns owners the success but did not reflect the real earnings of the workers (AGENL, JLCA, 1947e). The document presented to the arbitration board suggests Sanborns workers recognized that their U.S.-owned employer underpaid them compared with other companies operating in Monterrey. Significantly, many of the demands listed were exactly what Alejandra Molina argued for during her arbitration case a few years earlier, including paid holiday time off, paid lunch breaks, and labor protection against unjust suspensions or separation from their positions.

News of the strike vote caught Sanborns management off guard, and the company appeared unaware that a group of women workers had joined an independent union. Company lawyers decried the demands for a wage increase as “illegal and absurd” and presented as evidence to the arbitration board the collective bargaining agreement signed by workers the year prior. Lawyers also produced a list of signatures by seventy Sanborns workers in the ranks of the company controlled UESM. The statement indicated these employees found it “truly surprising” that an outside union was planning a strike since none of them authorized the motion (AGENL, JLCA, 1947f). The evidence would suggest the majority of Sanborns Monterrey employees remained loyal to the company union and were against the strike.

The labor movement against Sanborns set off a chain of events that exposed the company’s fears of having their workforce join a labor organization operating outside of company control. Tensions between the outside union and Sanborns management ran high leading up to the proposed strike date. On October 28th, 1947, a labor inspector wrote the arbitration board reporting on worker fears of retaliation and punishment. The inspector warned of evidence suggesting the company planned to coerce workers into voting against the strike. Sanborns managers had prevented workers “from acting freely and spontaneously of their will”. The official recommended the strike vote be held within the premises of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board to prevent Sanborns managers from using scare tactics to intimidate employees against voting the wrong way (AGENL, JLCA, 1947g). Sanborns lawyers insisted the strike vote should take place in their store, arguing there was potential risk from outside labor agitators who might pressure workers into voting a certain way. Ultimately, the arbitration board allowed the strike vote to take place at Sanborns. On the eve of the strike vote, labor inspectors visited Sanborns and found the store closed to the public with company employees locked indoors. The inspectors were denied entry and reported that the workers were either “detained” or kept there for a group meeting. Further testimony by workers revealed that employees were locked inside the store as early as 3:00pm and included workers from the morning shift (JLCA, AGENL, 1947h). Sanborns lawyers denied the claim.

On October 30, 1947, the strike vote proceeded at Sanborns Monterrey, and two labor inspectors oversaw the tally that took place. The results showed a majority of Sanborns employees voted against the strike, 83-22 (AGENL, JLCA, 1947i). Labor inspectors, however, wrote a scathing report stating that Sanborns managers had imposed “terrible moral and material pressure” on the workers, including their forced confinement in the store the day before. Inspectors specifically pointed out the objectionable behavior of Mrs. Bryan, the U.S. manager, who coerced workers “by means of word and signs”. Inspectors concluded that the vote itself was flawed and should not be accepted. They reported that Sanborns was in blatant violation of a number of labor practices and highlighted the mockery of the voting process. According to the reports, 10 employees voted using the names of other workers. The vote count included names of people that did not appear on the list of employees sent prior to the arbitrator’s office. Perhaps most appallingly, the names of Sanborns store managers appeared among the vote tallies, effectively rendering the entire vote as flawed. The vote tally also included the daughter of the Sanborns floor supervisor, Mrs. Bryan who obviously voted against the strike. Collectively, this evidence exposed the total lack of impartiality in the voting process. According to labor inspectors who witnessed the vote, Bryan intimidated workers by standing just a few feet away from where they cast their vote. Ironically, Sanborns lawyer agreed that workers were in fact victims of coercion, but due to the presence of the government inspectors and members from the outside union who supposedly encouraged workers to vote in favor of the strike (AGENL, JLCA, 1947j). The inspector reports reveal that working women experienced intimidation and hostility from company managers who pressured them to vote against the strike. Fearing the consequences of voting the wrong way probably weighed heavily on their vote. Women risked serious repercussions in the event the vote failed, such as possible retaliation, punishment, or termination from the company.

The inspector report on the labor vote offered a conflicting summation. On one hand, they documented Sanborns actively interfered with the voting process and intimidated workers against voting for the strike. The report then summarized incidents showing the strike vote was deeply flawed. Yet, despite all this, the inspectors ultimately concluded that the results should be accepted, arguing that despite the impartiality, voter intimidation, and pressure imposed by the managers, the workers still had the right to vote any way they wanted (AGENL, JLCA, 1947j). Not surprisingly, representatives from the independent union did not recognize the strike vote as legitimate and took issue with the assessment of the labor inspectors who had reluctantly accepted the results. By November 3, 1947, the independent union declared they would not give up their labor strike against Sanborns (AGENL, JLCA, 1947k).

On November 8th, 1947, a group of 40 people including members of UEHCRS entered Sanborns Monterrey and occupied the main dining hall. Mexican families eating their lunch watched on as the protestors sat at the tables and demanded service. While sitting around the tables, protestors ordered food they did not eat, smoked cigarettes, and flicked their ashes on the tables. A detachment of uniformed police showed up to prevent disorder. El Porvenir (Anonymous, 1947b) reported that a similar event had occurred just days before. During the incident, 24 waitresses from Sanborns met outside the store holding strike flags accompanied by a group of garbage men who were “especially chosen for their dirty and repugnant appearance. María de Jesús de la Fuente de O’Higgins, a frequent customer of Sanborns Monterrey, recalled the incident during a 2014 interview. According to O’Higgins, she arrived at Sanborns and encountered leaders from the UEHCRS along with garbage collectors sitting at the tables in the restaurant. “Imagine with the temperature of Monterrey how awful they smelled”, she said (Cruz Bravo et al., 2014). O’Higgins noticed many candles in the restaurant since the power was turned off, suggesting that Monterrey’s electrical workers may have participated in a sympathy strike.

The strike and subsequent occupation of the Sanborns dining hall by people described in the press as street beggars, and “dirty and disheveled individuals” challenged the company’s paternalism by disrupting the subordination of working-class women.

The protest continued for months and caused sustained economic damages to the company and its workers. Union representatives refused to meet Sanborns’s legal representatives within the office of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board and stalled talks. The government appeared to have tacitly allowed the strike to continue against Sanborns by approving five requests for rescheduled meetings between November 8th, 1947, and January 8, 1948 (AGENL, JLCA, 1947l). The maneuver allowed the strike to continue indefinitely, causing significant financial loss and damage against Sanborns’s reputation as customers abandoned the store. The prolonged strike reduced the wages of waitresses by more than 80% as U.S. tourists decided to spend their money elsewhere (Anonymous, 1947a: 10). As John Lear argues (2001: 223-226), these type of workplace occupations of restaurants shaped the collective identities of working people. Their presence in opulent sites of leisure challenges the social meaning of establishments and brought attention to labor conflicts.

In an interesting turn of events, representatives from the independent union visited Mexico City to enter direct talks with Sanborns Mexico and the office of the Governor of Nuevo León. These talks ultimately produced a compromise that ended the protracted labor dispute. The independent union bypassed the authority of both Sanborns Monterrey and the Conciliation and Arbitration Board of Nuevo León.

The maneuver effectively removed Sanborns Monterrey’s management from the labor discussions and muted them from having a voice in the terms of agreement (AGENL, JLCA, 1947m). Finally, on January 8, 1948, the labor strike against Sanborns Monterrey ended.

It remains unclear whether labor compromises were made to the workers at Sanborns Monterrey. The strike itself was barely reported in local newspapers, and the arbitration documents do not mention what concluded the prolonged labor movement against the company. However, the 1947 labor strike exposed what some of the everyday labor experiences were for a gendered workforce comprised almost entirely of working women. Sanborns paternalism created tensions and anxieties in the work-space. Without support or protections from the company controlled Sanborns union, working women at Sanborns felt vulnerable and routinely experienced violations against their labor protections by U.S. managers. Some women rejected the company’s paternalism by mobilizing themselves and by participating in labor action against the company.

Despite the active role of rank-and-file women workers participating in the labor movement against Sanborns, the arbitrators, company lawyers, union representatives, and government officials who oversaw the union decisions were all men. This showed that working women remained marginalized by male decision-makers. Nevertheless, working women at Sanborns expressed their power by using Sanborns as a stage to protest, organize, and improve their labor conditions.

The embarrassing spectacles at Sanborns Monterrey brought public attention to the unjust labor practices at the store. Working women challenged their subordinate position under Sanborns’s paternalistic labor system by inviting other socially marginalized people into the dining hall. This sharpened into focus the wide economic gap that separated the upper-class customers from the gendered workforce at Sanborns.

This work highlights some of the everyday labor conditions of working women in the retail sector in Mexico City and Monterrey from 1920-1948. It shows that Sanborns adopted a paternalistic labor system to manage its predominantly female workforce. A gendered hierarchy further subordinated women under the company’s upper management who were white U.S. born citizens. Women workers at Sanborns rejected Sanborns paternalism. Sometimes they were motivated into action through the eruptions of fellow employees, the presence of outside labor movements, or by the outbursts of visiting customers. Sanborns directors likely structured their labor system as a defensive tactic to insulate themselves from a wave of revolutionary unionism that followed the Mexican Revolution. As Sanborns grew in popularity, the company provided ample opportunities for non-unionized working-class women to fill a variety of positions inside the store. During their daily work experiences, women navigated around gender and class distinctions that separated them from their upper-class customers and their bosses. Without union protection, women worked in a precarious labor environment and faced potential punishment and possible dismissal by their managers. The company’s paternalistic system attempted to mold an obedient and docile workforce. In 1922, a group of CGT bread workers temporarily occupied Sanborns. The protest incident was an emblematic display of labor power directed against the company’s labor policies that subjugated non-unionized working women. The CGT bakers used Sanborns as a stage to bring attention to their own working-class struggles for improved labor conditions in Mexico City.

Since 1919, Sanborns waitresses became the focal point for how people visualized and defined class and race positions between upper-class guests and the working women who served them. Beginning in the 1930s, Sanborns introduced a new folkloric uniform that combined a highly selective appropriation of gendered clothing based on Mexico’s indigenous populations. The uniform further integrated working women under the company’s paternalism, as women’s bodies became encoded with a racialized meaning that reinforced their subordinate position within their workspace. 90 years after its introduction, this uniform is now synonymous with Sanborns and an easily identifiable symbol that all Mexicans surely recognize. In 1936, Sanborns opened a branch store in Monterrey. Company owners implemented the same labor strategy of hiring working women to fill a variety of store positions and hired U.S.-born citizens as store managers. The company preemptively organized its workers under a company-controlled union in the context of the pro-union national climate of the 1930s-1940s. However, the combination of these labor policies created tensions among working women at Sanborns who felt increasingly vulnerable in their workspace. Working women rejected Sanborns paternalism by filing lawsuits against the company, organizing themselves, and by going on strike. The 1947 labor strike against Sanborns Monterrey caused sustained economic damage and public embarrassment to Sanborns. A relative calm of labor activism following the strike suggests that Sanborns directors modified their company’s paternalism and expanded non-wage benefits to the work-force.