Making Social Categories from Local Roots and Class

Abstract

In his ethnography of Wasco, California, Walter Goldschmidt (1978a) describes a social distinction he found in each of the towns he examined during his seminal research on industrial agriculture in the 1940s. Using the terms nuclear group and outsider group to designate the main parts of this division, Goldschmidt notes that the nuclear group included the “business men, farm operators, professionals, and the regular employees of business houses, both white collar and skilled, and some semi-skilled labor,” who together comprised “the functioning members of the Wasco community.” They were “that body which grew up in Wasco and inherited the institutions of the community—that body to which Wasco belongs” The outsiders, in contrast, constituted “the agricultural laborers, both regularly employed and seasonal, and other forms of common labor,” all of whom arrived later than the nuclear group, and “remain outside the social walls of the community, against which they are constantly impinging. They are not accepted into community life, and they are not considered in community affairs” (Goldschmidt 1978a:58, 59, my emphasis).¹