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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series didn't occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive play that at the same time upended numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic moment, possibly the key turn in momentum in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting 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 observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's soccer teams promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization later committed $1m in support for families personally impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that local columnists labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and present and former players. A number of players including the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a detention company that runs detention facilities. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

These factors contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area writer one observer agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the organization's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill above the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story 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, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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