MIAMI - There is no box on U.S. Census forms that accurately describes Ray Gongora.

The Belize-born naturalized citizen grew up in an English-speaking Central American country, a former British colony where African slaves were once sold. He immigrated in 1986 to a country that deemed him Hispanic based on the geography of his birth.

“I identify myself as ‘other,’” Gongora says. “I am Black, so to speak — a brown-skinned Caribbean person. You cannot identify yourself as a Black American because our cultures are so totally different.”

He doesn’t worry about not being counted, though. Not with President-elect Barack Obama set to take office Jan. 20.

Obama, the son of a White woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya, will be the first Black U.S. president, fulfilling the dreams and promise of the civil rights era. But for Black immigrants and their children, Obama’s swearing-in realizes other dreams.

In Obama, they recognize their own parents, who saw themselves as outsiders, and the children they raised to believe that education was the road to success. His election superseded not only color, but also economics, family divisions, government failures and nagging questions of identity.

“It’s an individual accomplishment for each of us,” Gongora said.

Gongora, a 53-year-old postal worker, scheduled a vacation day Jan. 20 to watch the inauguration on television at his Pembroke Pines home. His hope for his U.S.-born children is that no one will question their citizenship in an Obama administration, even with a Honduran mother and a Belize-born father.

“I said to my (17-year-old) son, ‘You were born here. You can be president even if your parents were both born in different countries,’” he said.

Haitian American schoolchildren were so caught up in the election that they wrote “Obama” on their arms as they talked about their culture in a Haitian Heritage Museum program this fall. His story, not just his skin color, was so similar to their own, said Lawrence Gonzalez, the Miami museum’s education manager.