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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's favor after appearing for much of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots per game.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, even Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team subsequently pledged $1m in support for families personally affected by the raids but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the team's boast in having been the first major league team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that legacy and the principles it represents by executives and present and former players. Several team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He was unable to finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

"These men in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the organization's present owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Hispanic communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a evening curfew.

International Players and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {