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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team executed one dramatic escape feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive immigration raids started in the city in June, and national guard troops were sent into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs quickly issued statements of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. Under significant public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $one million in aid for individuals personally affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 World Series victory at the White House – a move that local columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. A number of players including the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a share in a detention corporation that operates detention centers. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

All of that contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" local columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many fans who have similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to back the players and its roster of international stars, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've acted around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {