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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable sporting achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the series like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, 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 is so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in the city in June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Months before, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. Several team members including the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series victory and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its roster of international players, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in support of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Community Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {