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For a lifelong Dodgers fan 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 squad executed one dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying 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 juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military units were sent into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, even Latinos, are supporters of certain political figures. After significant external demands, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the government.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and former players. Several team members including the coach had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either changed their minds or gave in to pressure from team management.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a detention company that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the luck it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its roster of international stars, including the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in support of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"These men in suits don't get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They have acted around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {