eastside living LA

Political Chickens in Whimsical Worlds

Street artist Cache puts his thoughts in color

 

By Andrea Alegría
Contributing Writer

Images Courtesy of Cache

 

He goes by the street name Cache – he’s probably written it on more than 100 city walls, benches and dumpsters while looking over his shoulder for cops.  

He’s the 32-year-old street artist behind those whimsical murals of chickens that have become landmarks along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park and other parts of the city. The artwork has also garnered significant respect from the graffiti community, and, in recent years, landed him in the pages of a few magazines.

“I try to give people a smile and a thought at the same time,” he says with a smirk and a slight shrug of the shoulder, while he stands outside the bicycle shop where he works on a recent Saturday afternoon. Until recently and for 11 years, he worked as a bike messenger by day, painting the city by night. 

Since his late 20s, Cache has been painting colorful murals of plump comic birds with bright red combs and short beaks to convey a wide range of messages. In one wall, chickens stare lovingly into each other’s eyes against a backdrop of pink hearts and buzzing bees; in another, they march in protest down a street with signs calling for equality for all.

“Cute” might be a word that easily describes Cache’s work, however, his murals are strongly political. 

“Carlos Castañeda wrote about humans living like chickens, about humaneros – human coups – and how we can all live like chickens just for the benefit of those in power,” he says. 

Castañeda’s book, “The Teachings of Don Juan,” largely influenced Cache’s infamous character, through which he now questions issues like the division of social classes, and the oppression of the poor. 

In his favorite mural, near the corner of Melrose and Heliotrope, a Zapatista rides a bicycle, his fist clenched and raised, between a pink chicken and a green octopus, also on bicycles. The pink chicken is a bike messenger and is raising his U-Lock (a bicycle lock) in defiance at the green tentacles that curl towards him. One of the tentacles holds a sign that says “Ride On”.

He painted this mural with the help of his friend, street artist Eyer (known for his black-clad Zapatista character), along the wall of Orange 20, a bicycle shop where he works 

“Those are the tentacles of society itself,” Cache explains while staring at the wall. 

A self-proclaimed pessimist and avid reader, Cache dubs American society “the machine” and references books like 1984 and Brave New World, while describing where he thinks we’re headed. “We’re a society in decline.” 

He adds, “I don’t agree with this system of haves and the have-nots. It’s not because people are lazy, a lot of people work their butts off their whole lives, working two or three jobs, but they just can never move beyond their same spot.”

In another of his murals, chickens and Zapatistas with monkey wrenches break the gears in a machine, while off to the side a tranquil chicken sits under a tree, reading “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, one of Cache’s favorite books. Two rotund chickens bat around a beach ball in far the background.

Laid back and friendly, dressed in a grey hooded sweatshirt and shorts, Cache does little to conceal a childlike defiance of rules and regulations.  

“What is defacing public property anyway?” he jokes, as he mentions that 98% of his murals have been painted illegally. “I mean, most of these walls are painted like [crap], look at the colors that they use, they’re like prisons of the mind. Who wants to live in a gray and beige world?”

His thoughts are at odds with the County of Los Angeles’s zero tolerance anti-graffiti effort, which considers graffiti as blight and tries to whitewash and clean up graffiti within 48 hours. Tagging is practiced frequently by local gangs to mark their territories, and has been the object of stern law enforcement crackdowns in recent years.

 “Graffiti has always been the voice of the oppressed. Everywhere in the world that you go, the people doing the graffiti are always those that are being pushed aside from society. If people are not allowed to express themselves, we’re going to explode or implode eventually,” he says.

Cache was born in Guatemala during a time of civil war. His mother, who left escaping poverty and a drunken husband, moved them to LA when he was ten years old. 

“It was a bit of a culture clash at first trying to get used to this machine,” he says of his childhood, growing up at Union and Third Street. “It was tough for my mom, we were pretty well off in Guatemala and my dad pretty much drank it all away. My mom used to have maids, now she was a maid. She still works for a really rich lady in Beverly Hills,” he says.

Growing up in a rough neighborhood, he began tagging at an early age and was arrested five or six times as a juvenile. 

“People are always trying to leave their mark no matter what they do, and when you’re a ghetto kid growing up, graffiti is the way you put yourself out there,” he says. 

His mother disapproved of his tagging which she considered vandalism, until years later, when he began painting murals. It was his mother who first dubbed him Cache, poking fun at his baggy pants. In Spanish Cache means stylish. He later decided to take it up as his street name.

While many of his friends joined gangs – some are now in prison or dead – it was his artistic inclination, he says, which might have helped him stay clear of the gang lifestyle his friends succumbed to. 

For him, graffiti led to a progression from outright vandalism to legitimate art. He recognizes this progression in younger artists today. “Seeing these artists go from simple tags to intricate murals is amazing!”

There’s a lot more to graffiti than what people see up on a wall, he says. It’s a culture of friendship deeply rooted on the thrill of breaking the law and getting away with it.

“It’s about all the other elements that come with being a street artist: stealing paint, stealing markers, getting chased by police, getting into trouble with your friends, that’s what graffiti is to me. It’s a culture of friendship that you develop with different people that are going through the same thing you are, broken homes, no dad. Maybe I’m just generalizing, but a big percentage of kids doing this stuff come from really bad backgrounds,” he says.

Often, Cache’s murals become canvases for other taggers, who paint over his chickens. Back in the day, he says, artists respected each other’s work. But Cache doesn’t get angry. “You can’t blame them. This is what happens when you neglect society, when you keep people slaves to 2 or 3 jobs to maintain a household, there is no time to raise the kids.” 

Instead, he keeps a watchful eye over his walls and works quickly to clean them up when they get tagged.

“There’s been times seriously when I had just a few dollars left in the bank and it was either a meal or a little bit of paint to clean up my murals, and I decided to clean my murals, because, to me, these murals are me. I’ve got to take care of them just like I take care of myself.”

Cache has plans to paint more murals on LA walls in the coming months. He’s also developing an idea for a future comic book based on a world of tentacled aliens and chickens. The green octopus-like characters from his murals would be in power and the chickens would be slaves. This world would speak to a situation where “the roots of enslavement are so deep that we no longer remember that we are slaves.”  

“When you know you’re a slave you have a reason to fight slavery, but when you’re made to believe you’re not a slave you have nothing to fight against,” he adds.

Cache, who was probably 17 when he first scribbled a chicken on some scrap of paper for no particular reason, says he’s a big believer in “things coming together and falling into place”. 

“I drew this chicken, scribbling it on paper, it was kind of a joke. I didn’t think much of it. Then as I got older, probably 24-25, I just kind of remembered the little character, kept practicing it a little more, and that’s when I read the Teachings of Don Juan and it influenced me to continue with the chicken idea.

“Next thing you know it’s in a few magazines, and I’m like wow, a little chicken has the power to influence people.”

 

Andrea Alegría works as a freelance writer in Los Angeles, where she has covered a wide range of issues including politics, immigration, crime, health and business. Her work has appeared in HOY newspaper, Los Angeles Times, PODER magazine, Hispanic magazine and Vista magazine.

andrea@eastsidelivingla.com