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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series did not occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost 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.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and military troops were sent into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a sizable portion of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but made no public criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the official residence – a move that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by executives and current and past players. Several players such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local writer one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many fans who share Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its roster of international 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 Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the manager and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than just the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the home he lost to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Latino writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable 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 restriction.

International Players and Community Bonds

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