White America can talk about Barack Obama making history Tuesday, but Mary Alice Shumate, 69, can rattle off examples from her own family history that flesh out that fact.

Her grandmother worked as a "domestic" for the mayor of Vicksburg, Miss., cleaning his house and helping raise his children.

But because she was black, she had to pay a $3 poll tax in order to vote for her boss's re-election. She was told her vote would not be counted, whether she paid the tax or not.

"I wish my grandmother could have lived to see this day," Shumate says.

The sentiment is a common one in Yuba-Sutter.

Yuba City's Hispanic, East Asian and black residents make up more than 40 percent of its population, and Marysville's minority proportions are collectively about 20 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers.

Shumate and others say they feel a personal connection to Obama because of his minority status and humble beginnings.

A long-time resident of Yuba City, Shumate was brought up in the 1940s and '50s under the deep South's Jim Crow laws, and then exposed to pre-Civil Rights California, where landlords were free to openly reject potential renters on the basis of race.

Because Obama is bi-racial, she says, his experience has been unique in comparison with past presidents.

"He has insight into so many different cultures, and that has broadened him," Shumate says.

And cultural sensitivity will be key to America's survival in the global marketplace, she says.

Paul Moua, 48, grew up in Laos, and came to the U.S. as a Hmong refugee in 1980.

The Linda resident says that life in impoverished Laos gives him a deep appreciation of the hope the president-elect represents for young people. Obama, he says, has the energy and the know-how to help the poor and minorities succeed in the U.S.

"People will not be so discouraged because of their race. They will see that if they get a quality education, they can do whatever they wish, and can succeed," he says. "I have these same feelings for my children and for future generations of my family."

"He gives people more hope that they can be something," says Ana Gonzales, owner of El Zarape restaurant in Yuba City.

Gonzales, born in Colima, Mexico, says most of her friends and family members have been excited about the prospect of having Obama as their new president.

Though she has lived in the U.S. for 45 years and owned the restaurant for 35 years, she has not yet achieved her citizenship.

She never felt more guilty and sorry about that fact, she says, than on Tuesday, when she had to stand by and watch others go to the polls.

"I did feel so bad because this is history," she says.

Now that Obama has been elected, she is hoping he will find sensible, but compassionate ways to deal with issues concerning illegal immigration.

"You can't just give jobs to illegals," she says, "but there are so many of them, and they need to work."

Non-white Americans, she says, are especially interested in seeing Obama instill a sense of pride in the country's minority youth.

"You have to be ambitious, you have to really want to be somebody if you want to be successful as a minority," she says.

Obama understands this, she says, "because he too is a minority."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com