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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series did not happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic escape act after another and then winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not just a great sporting moment, perhaps the key turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are 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 chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Organization

After aggressive immigration raids began in the city in early June, and military troops were sent into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer teams promptly released statements of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for families personally affected by the raids but issued no public criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and current and former players. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Supporter Conflicts

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its roster of global stars, including the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in support of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits do not get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the organization's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {