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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic escape act after another before winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández 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, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not just a remarkable sporting achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant external demands, the team later committed $one million in support for families personally impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's boast in having been the pioneering major league franchise to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. A number of players such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a detention company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has said many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"The executives 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 Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill above the city center and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the organization over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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