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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series didn't happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying escape feat after another and then prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged numerous negative misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't just a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

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

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 spots each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and military troops were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer teams quickly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for families directly impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and current and former athletes. Several team members including the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a share in a detention company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many fans who have Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of international players, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic fans 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 avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Fan Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {