NYTWhen the Trump administration and it's ICE agents began their focus on Southern California many government officials, community organizations and some sports franchises spoke out in support of the regions immigrant communities.
"But Santos’s favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, stayed strangely quiet. The Dodgers are arguably the most popular sports franchise in the area, and a cultural touchstone for Latinos. Like many others, Santos assumed they would support beleaguered immigrants. Yet as videos circulated of ICE seizing Angelenos, often violently, the Dodgers said nothing, apart from a single supportive Instagram post by a player, Kiké Hernández. “We knew we were being made an example of — not just Latinos but all of Los Angeles,” Ingrid Rivera-Guzman, president of the Latino Coalition of Los Angeles, says. “And the Dodgers’ silence felt complicit.”
"Many Latinos were already angry that the Dodgers, who won last year’s World Series, accepted the traditional invitation to visit the White House in April. As the raids intensified, so did the outrage. More than 40 percent of the Dodgers’ fan base is Latino, Dylan Hernández wrote in a Los Angeles Times column that tagged the team as “cowardly.” But the Dodgers, he continued, couldn’t “even be bothered to offer the shaken community any words of comfort.”
On June 19, " the team announced that it was contributing $1 million to aid families who were affected by the deportations, though details were vague. “We have heard the calls for us to take a leading role,” the Dodgers’ president, Stan Kasten, said in a carefully worded statement that did not mention ICE or immigration, only “recent events in the region.” Since then, no Dodgers executive has commented publicly on any aspect of the raids. Within two weeks, America First Legal, a nonprofit co-founded by the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, filed a civil rights complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission, accusing the Dodgers of “apparently engaging in unlawful discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
"The Dodgers are a conspicuously multicultural franchise. Herradura tequila and Estrella Jalisco beer are prominently featured at Dodger Stadium, where mariachi bands often perform live. Images of the most popular Los Angeles Dodger ever, Fernando Valenzuela, can be seen around the ballpark. More relevant, perhaps, Mark Walter, the team’s controlling owner, contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama and the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. It hardly requires a leap of imagination for the team’s executives to feel at risk of retribution from the Trump administration."
"Still, understanding the Dodgers’ predicament didn’t make their caution any easier for Latinos to accept. Americans look to sports to help tell the story of who we are, or at least how we perceive ourselves. No franchise has promoted inclusion — and, therefore, an implicit acknowledgment of the institutionalized racism of the past — more than the Dodgers. In 1947, they integrated the major leagues by bringing Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn. After moving across the country a decade later, they pioneered Spanish-language radio broadcasts and courted Hispanics."
"To those who crossed the border and settled in the Southland, there was no stronger symbol of their newly gained status as Americans, and Angelenos, than the blue Dodgers hat."
“When you first move here and try to fit in, whether as a kid or as a working-age person, you’re most likely going to go to a Dodger game. You put on a Dodger hat, and you instantly become someone from L.A. rather than an outsider.”
"That support for the Dodgers spilled into the streets of the city after they won the World Series last fall. Some 250,000 people attended the victory parade through downtown. “My entire family was out there — my daughter, my nieces, my nephews,” CHIRLA’s Salas says. “Our people were out there in the street celebrating with the Dodgers. We were feeling so good. And then what happened? They went to see Trump.”
"By July, social media was awash in anti-Dodgers sentiment from Latinos. L.A. Taco’s Cabral circulated a video of a Latino fan getting a Dodgers tattoo removed."
"A few weeks later I spoke with Miguel Rojas, a Dodgers infielder from Venezuela, before a game. When I asked about the threat from ICE, he said that he understood the disquiet the fans must be feeling. He and the other Latinos on the team were feeling it, too. Los Angeles has “a big population of Mexicans, people from Guatemala, people from Honduras,” he said. “And like them, we came here as immigrants, to work and chase a dream. And as soon as the game is over and the lights are off, when I take my car and drive to my place, I’m an immigrant too. I’m here with my green card, and I’m concerned about my rights. What do I do if something like that happened to me? Or to any of my family?”
For the record, the Dodgers swept their first round of the playoffs beating the Cincinnati Reds 2 - 0. They now face a stiffer challenge playing the Philadelphia Phillies in a five game series.
Writer Bruce Schoenfeld wrote this feature story for the "New York Times Magazine." It focuses on the Los Angeles Dodgers and their place in the Southern California market. The Trump administration is demanding that businesses, schools, community organizations and others eliminate any type of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. And what comprises the largest portion of the fan base for the Dodgers -- Southern California's Hispanic population.
