🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series did not happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying comeback act after another and then prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive play that at the same time upended many negative misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, possibly the key turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After intensified immigration raids began in the city in June, and military troops were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

Management has said the organization prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. Under significant external demands, the team later committed $1m in aid for individuals personally affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their 2024 championship win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and present and past players. A number of team members including the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a private prison company that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global players, including the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's business leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"These men in formal attire don't get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, goes further than just the organization's current owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the city razing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an impoverished worker at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, 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 too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {