Los Angeles Dodgers Secure the Championship, Yet for Latino Fans, It's Not So Simple

For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape act after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, 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 years.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' direction 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 Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for her or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were deployed into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams promptly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for individuals directly impacted by the operations but made no public criticism of the government.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that local columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's boast in having been the first professional team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the values it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. A number of players such as the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that operates enforcement centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many fans who share similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its roster of international stars, including the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the team's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that documents the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. 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 exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic 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 warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

International Stars and Fan Connections

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