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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's favor after appearing for most of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as half of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams promptly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $one million in aid for individuals personally affected by the operations but made no official criticism of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship win at the White House – a move that local writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former athletes. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a share in a detention corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the team the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have similar reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team 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 clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then selling the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when demands to boycott 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 demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

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