Arnold Schoenberg

* Apparently, Ruben Martinez finds it somehow symbolic that UCLA’s Schoenberg Plaza has been appropriated and renamed “Plaza Aztlan” by Chicano activists (“The Emergence of L.A.’s True Identity,” Commentary, June 9). The transformation is supposed to symbolize the reawakening of L.A.’s Mexican past.

Schoenberg Plaza is not named after merely another “dead European composer,” but after my grandfather, Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew born in Vienna who fled Nazi persecution in Europe in 1933 and spent the last 17 years of his life right here in Los Angeles. Because he taught at UCLA for several years, and because some people regard him as the greatest composer and teacher of his era, the university named its new music building and the adjoining plaza after him.

My grandfather was thrown out of Europe; now those who would cast his memory out of Los Angeles call him a “dead European.” Los Angeles is first and foremost a home to refugees and immigrants, more of whom live here now than the total number of all people who lived here prior to 1900. The world already has a Europe, a Korea, an Iran and a Mexico. People come to Los Angeles to be somewhere else.

E. RANDOL SCHOENBERG

Westwood