For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed one dramatic escape feat after another before winning in extra innings against the opposing team.
It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive play that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.
The moment in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.
This was not merely a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.
"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."
"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."
However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.
After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports teams quickly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the baseball team.
Management has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a view influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. Under significant external demands, the team later pledged $1m in aid for families personally affected by the raids but issued no public criticism of the administration.
Three months before, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular references of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and past players. Several players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.
A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.
These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won championship victory and the following explosion of team support across the city.
"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the team the luck it required to succeed.
Many fans who have Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach 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 team for more time than they have."
The problem, however, runs deeper than just the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Hispanic communities on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.
A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.
"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the awkward reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.
Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {
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