🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic comeback feat after another before winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time upended numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $one million in aid for families personally impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship victory at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and current and past players. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing explosion of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have brought the team the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than just the team's present owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {