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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series did not happen during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting moment, possibly the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the many of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams promptly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. Under significant external demands, the team later pledged $one million in support for individuals personally affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and current and former athletes. Several players including the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a share in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. The group's leadership has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Community Impact

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

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