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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series did not occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying comeback feat after another and then prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic moment, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the games like the weaker team. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the streets, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"The players presented this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in early June, and military units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams promptly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. After considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the government.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their 2024 championship win at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the values it represents by executives and present and past players. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the squad the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {