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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series didn't occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the area to respond to resulting protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly issued messages of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $1m in support for families directly impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a move that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and former players. Several players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs detention facilities. The group's leadership has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the team the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire don't get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Community Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 record that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Stars and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {