Los Angeles Dodgers Secure the World Series, However for Hispanic Supporters, It's Complex

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting achievement, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's favor after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were sent into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer clubs promptly released statements of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently committed $1m in aid for individuals personally impacted by the operations but made no public criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Past Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first 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 athletes. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a detention corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many supporters who share similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its roster of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue 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 investors.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, goes further than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've acted around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a simple matter, {