For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback act after another before winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.
It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended many harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in recent years.
The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.
This was not merely a great athletic moment, possibly the key turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for most of the games like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.
"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."
"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."
Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.
After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.
The team president stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $1m in support for families directly affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.
Three months before, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that local columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the first major league team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it represents by executives and current and former athletes. Several team members such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.
A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement centers. The group's executives has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.
These factors contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.
"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.
Many supporters who share similar reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.
"The executives in suits don't get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."
The issue, though, runs deeper than just the organization's current owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Hispanic communities on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.
Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.
"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands 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 protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.
Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {
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