The LA Dodgers Win the Championship, But for Latino Supporters, It's Complicated

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't just a great sporting moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's favor after appearing for much of the series like the weaker team. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer clubs quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the organization later pledged $1m in aid for families personally affected by the operations but made no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous championship victory at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by officials and current and past athletes. A number of team members including the coach had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a detention corporation that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the following explosion of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer agonized at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, runs deeper than just the team's current proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles 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 market value. A track on a 2005 album that documents the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {