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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed one dramatic escape act after another and then prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

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

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting moment, possibly the decisive turn in momentum in the team's direction after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, 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 contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. 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 show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for families directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the government.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former athletes. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the following outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many fans who share similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the team and its roster of global players, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Community Impact

The issue, though, goes further than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill above downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Fan Connections

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