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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series did not happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying comeback act after another before winning in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, possibly the key shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots each time.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, even Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team later committed $1m in aid for families directly affected by the operations but made no official condemnation of the government.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their 2024 World Series victory at the White House – a decision that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the first major league team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by executives and present and past players. A number of players including the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention company that operates detention centers. The group's leadership has stated 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 certain agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his personal protest must have brought the team the luck it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of global stars, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the team's current proprietors. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the city demolishing 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 song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {