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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't just a great sporting achievement, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

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

However, it's entirely simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer teams quickly issued messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, even Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a move that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and past athletes. A number of players including the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the following outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have brought the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its roster of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in support of the manager and his players but jeered the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic 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 numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Community Bonds

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