Los Angeles Dodgers Win the World Series, But for Hispanic Supporters, It's Not So Simple

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another before winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously challenged numerous negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for most of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly released statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

Management stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. After considerable external demands, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in aid for families directly affected by the raids but issued no official criticism of the government.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by executives and current and past athletes. A number of team members including the manager had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have brought the team the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its roster of global stars, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain 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 approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits 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 Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then transferring the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

International Players and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {