🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series did not occur during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, game-winning play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the area to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams quickly issued statements of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of certain leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team later committed $1m in support for individuals personally affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first professional team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a detention company that operates detention centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the team the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who share Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of international stars, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team'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 approval of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"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."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward reality that attendance at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

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