3.California-born and Stanford-educated, John Steinbeck gained prominence during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a novelist who combined themes of social protest with a benign view of human nature and a biological interpretation of human experience, a combination that gained him wide popularity and provided the basis for a career not only in fiction but also in journalism, the theater, and films.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., was born in 1902, in the Salinas Valley, whose scenery, agricultural workers, and ne'er-do-well paisanos appear frequently in his fiction. His father was treasurer of Monterey County, and his mother was a former schoolteacher. Their library introduced him early to such standard authors as Milton, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. He was a contributor to the school newspaper, a varsity athlete, and president of his graduating class in high school, and he attended Stanford University sporadically between 1920 and 1925, majoring in English, but never finished the degree. He worked on ranches and on a road gang before trying futilely to establish himself as a writer during a brief stay in New York City in 1926, and he worked in a California fish hatchery and camped in the Sierras before publishing his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. In those years he read D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and particularly the novelists James Branch Cabelland, Hemingway with enthusiasm, but his perennial interests were the classics of Continental literature and the ancient historians.

In 1930 he married and moved to Pacific Grove, California, where his father provided a house and small allowance to support him. Two unsuccessful novels treating the enchantment of the American Dream and the cost of pursuing it (The Pastures of Heaven, 1932, and To a God Unknown, 1933) preceded his first successes, Tortilla Flat in 1935 and In Dubious Battle in 1936. The first was an episodic, warmly humorous treatment of a band of paisanos (a mixture of Spanish, Indian, and Caucasian strands). Their picturesque and shiftless ways, naive affection for their church, mystical appreciation of nature, and loyalty to their band are given the air of legend and likened to the tales of King Arthur's Round Table. The second deals with a strike among fruit pickers, its defeat by the landowners with their vigilantes, and the efforts of communist organizers first to organize the strike and then to exploit the workers.

Question:"Paisanos" means ________.

A. rich people

B. poor people

C. peasants

D. laborers