For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying comeback act after another and then winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.
It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent years.
The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure 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 backwards.
This was not merely a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the team's favor after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.
"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."
"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so easy to be demoralized these days."
Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.
The Mixed Connection with the Team
After intensified enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard units were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs quickly issued messages of support with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.
Management stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant portion of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. After considerable public pressure, the team later committed $one million in aid for individuals directly affected by the operations but made no public condemnation of the government.
Official Event and Past Legacy
Months earlier, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", considering the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and past athletes. Several players such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.
Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas
An additional issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.
These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.
"Can one to support the team?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.
Separating the Players from the Management
Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its roster of international players, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.
"These men in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."
Past Context and Neighborhood Effect
The issue, however, runs deeper than just the organization's current owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that documents the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to removal is now third base.
Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.
"They have acted around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a evening curfew.
Global Stars and Fan Bonds
Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {
