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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series did not happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another before winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, game-winning out. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "The world saw Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer teams quickly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. After considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in support for families directly affected by the operations but made no public condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Three months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship victory at the White House – a decision that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. Several team members including the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison company that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Many supporters who share Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its roster of global stars, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in support of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's present proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill above the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting 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," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Community Connections

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