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Featured Home: The Compound
One man’s trash is this couple’s trailer treasure

The Ybarra’s original trailer, wrapped in used tire scraps and retrofitted with shipping containers.

Surely those who have passed by the Las Aguas del Marrón trailer park have noticed the strikingly unusual display of stacked shipping containers nestled beneath the canopy of mesquite trees. Not as noticeable are the hidden structures strategically buried around this triple-wide lot, including an old school bus and an expired travel trailer.

Dick and Mary Jane Ybarra have resided in the park since 1974, when they purchased Lot #23 and installed a modest mobile home. That same year, the Ybarra’s started their own business, Art Farts, one of Las Cruces’ first art studios and galleries. The studio struggled for many years until about 1999, around the time the California refugee mass-migration began.

“Suddenly business really picked up and we almost couldn’t keep up with the demand for our brightly colored handicrafts. At one time, we were even buying crap from the Salvation Army and scavenging dumpsters for unique items, then Mary Jane would just splatter them with bright paint and put an Art Farts sticker on the bottom,” explains Dick.

“We found a bunch of broken televisions for free at a rummage sale once, splattered them with pink paint, filled them with dirt and a small cactus, and sold them as decorative garden planters for 89 bucks. It’s all about the power of art,” added Mary Jane, rolling her eyes.

The Ybarras get refreshed in the Las Aguas del Marrón community pool.

It was this success and ingenuiety, and a stroke of misfortune, that led the Ybarra’s to begin constructing their dream home. In 2001, two adjacent neighbors were evicted from their trailers for domestic battery and running a meth lab, and the lots sat empty for months, circled in crime scene tape. Dick jumped on the opportunity.

The couple purchased the adjacent lots, forming a triple-wide space, and began digging. To save money, they initially hired a crew of Mexican laborers to dig the holes with shovels, but hit a thick layer of caliche and were forced to change their plans.

Dick developed what he called “water bombs”, pouring a mixture of gunpowder and starting fluid into holes drilled in the caliche, flooding the pits with gasoline-laced water, and igniting it.

“We did this early on a Sunday morning when most people are still passed out from the night before and the city offices are closed. There was a series of loud booms and a few fireballs, but it worked and nobody even noticed.” Dick and his crew then cleared away the piles of hard earth with shovels and buckets and dumped it into the nearby irrigation canal. Dick, the grandson of an ex-communicated Amish farmer, says he has an aversion to machines and technology, and prefers to do everything by hand.

With the trenches dug, the Ybarras began their search for the least expensive housing options they could find. After attending a train yard liquidation auction in El Paso, they came home with four old shipping containers destined for the junkyard.

Building up. Making maximum use of the triple-wide lot.

“We were the only bidders, and we snagged those babies for a hundred bucks a piece,” said Mary Jane. “We bought them from this guy with a flatbed hauler who said he would transport them for an extra hundred bucks and a case of Coors.”

The shipping containers were placed beside the Ybarra’s original trailer and elevated on cinderblocks and old logs. Dick fused the containers and the trailer into one connected unit with a blowtorch and pieces of re-bar found in a trash pile at the rear of the trailer park. Mary Jane began planning the interior decor.

“We wanted to do something completely different that didn’t involve everyday things like walls, ceilings, and doors. And we wanted to have enough room for Dick’s giant stuffed teddy bear.”

An old school bus, buried undergroud, provides a cool refuge on hot summer days.

Armed with a sledgehammer, Mary Jane gutted the entire interior, knocking down all the inner walls and punching a few holes around the outer sides to allow natural light in.

Mary Jane, who cooks for a hobby but doesn’t actually eat, wanted her new kitchen to be something special. She collaborated with one of the volunteers at ReStore to help her decide on which countertop to get.

“This nice young man named Ralph worked with me on my decision. I knew exactly what I wanted, but they only had two countertops in stock that day and one of them was covered with cigarette burns, so I went with the yellow Formica one.”

Dick spends a quiet moment in his Man-Room, basking in the glow of his illuminative creation, “999 Lamps.”

Dick also desired his own private space, which he calls his “Man Room.” To give the Man Room a more “warm, comfortable feeling”, Dick installed hundreds of light bulbs on the ceiling, naming the display “999 Lamps.” The massive energy required to power nearly 1,000 lightbulbs is offset by the solar panels Dick installed on the roof of Container #3.

The Ybarras, who refuse to buy anything new, have outfitted their entire home with used furnishings and found objects.

“We weren’t really sure what kind of look we were after, but after collecting a series of couches from the dumpster behind the Salvation Army and getting smokin’ deals on original velvet paintings down in Palomas, we realized we were going for the 1979 look,” said Mary Jane. “Entering our home is like stepping into a time warp. It’s fun!”

Most of their furnishings have cost less than $25, with the exception of Dick’s gigantic 8-foot tall pink teddy bear, purchased from an artist in Bisbee, Arizona for $500.

“I love the color pink and I love bears – I just had to get it.”

Last year, the couple were able to expand their living quarters into eight additional trailers that were at risk of being hauled away to the scrap yard. Several of the Ybarra’s neighbors had moved out of Las Aguas and into tract housing near the Picacho Peak Country Club, leaving their trailers behind. Dick bought the old trailers for a song. Unable to build a pulley system strong enough to lift the trailers, he hired a local man with an industrial-size forklift to stack the trailers on top of one another. They intend to fill the trailers with more broken furniture and assorted useless junk, eventually turning it into art. Trailer #2 has already become a sort of safehouse for bulky avocado green kitchen appliances. Dick plans to refurbish the stoves and refrigerators, and repaint them with silver chrome spray paint for that modern titanium look.

Mary Jane tends to a member of the Ybarra cactus patch, Phallus Pokeus.

The lot’s landscaping has also received Mary Jane’s creative touch and attention to detail, where she has cultivated a variety of chile, squash, and other edible plants, in addition to what may be Las Cruces’ most unique cactus garden.

“I like to grow food-bearing plants as a hobby,” says Mary Jane, “but I’d never actually eat them. It’s just a hobby. This stuff might have bugs and dirt and stuff on it – I don’t want to get sick or nothing, so I get all my vegetables at Albertson’s.”

Mary Jane’s vision for her cactus garden came to her one day after receiving an email from a friend containing several pictures of plants that look like human genitalia.

“I was laughin’ my ass off when I seen these pictures on the Innernet. There was this tree that totally looked like a nekkid lady spreading her legs, and then I saw this bulbous carrot that looked like a you-know-what!”

It was that deformed carrot that inspired Mary Jane to attempt a similar feat, but with assorted cactus plants. It’s been a project that has taken many years, but the slow-growth of a particular barrel cactus has rewarded her with her prized creation, Phallus Pokeus. Mary Jane is considering entering the cactus patch into this year’s Tour of Gardens, but remains apprehensive because it isn’t like a normal backyard.

The famous “Penis Fountain”, hand-sculpted by Mary Jane.

To enhance the unusual landscape, Mary Jane designed and built a water fountain, using a mixture of blasted caliche, natural clay, and composted human feces strained from the Ybarra’s waste lagoon. Inspired by the “cock and balls” fountain in Amsterdam, she proceeded to create a larger version, circled by a birdbath. She says the flowing water often attracts enough pigeons that she is able to trap one or two for dinner.

“It’s about sustainability and being green. We reuse everything and waste nothing,” said Mary Jane proudly as she pointed to her hand-strung pigeon bone bracelet.
The Ybarras are planning to open their compound to the public on the third Saturday of every other month and offer $5 tours around the lot.

“We want the opportunity to share our simply superior lifestyle with friends and neighbors, and to educate people about creating a private paradise from a pile of junk. In 50 years there won’t be any oil left to fuel all these big trucks. Now’s the time to start stacking all these surplus trailers.”