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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and military units were deployed into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. Under significant external demands, the organization later committed $1m in aid for families personally affected by the operations but issued no public criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a decision that local columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. A number of players including the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have similar reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of international stars, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the organization's current proprietors. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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