3 days ago8 min read
Bordertown: Legal Discrimination in Tucson: A History
In 1865, Arizona’s Second Territorial Legislature prohibited marriages between white people and “Negroes, mulattoes, Indians and Mongolians,” declaring all such marriages illegal and void in the Arizona Territory. The punishment for violating the law were fines in the range of $100 to $10,000 (in 2025, the equivalent of $2,000 to $200,000) and a prison term of anywhere between three months to ten years, although the fines and imprisonment were at the discretion of local judge



