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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. the second baseman, 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, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

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

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of certain leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $1m in support for families personally impacted by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that local columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by officials and present and past players. A number of team members including the manager had voiced reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, include a share in a detention corporation that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many fans who share Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its roster of international stars, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Context and Community Impact

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Community Connections

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {