Explanation:

    The border between the United States and Mexico is the international border that is crossed more often than any other international border in the world. It stretches (or reaches) 1,969 miles (or 3,169 kilometers) and touches four U.S. states: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. There are about 250 million legal crossings every year, and many more that are illegal (or against the law).

    When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Mexico and the United States signed an official agreement called the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Treaty put the border between the two countries on the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. In that same agreement, Mexico ceded (or gave away) more than half of its land, or about 525,000 square miles (or 1.36 million square kilometers), to the United States.

    About 80,000 Mexicans lived in that area when the land was transferred and its ownership changed from Mexico to the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave those Mexicans U.S. citizenship. In that same treaty, the United States also agreed to honor (or respect) the property rights (or the ownership of land) of the Mexicans who lived in the land that was transferred from Mexico to the United States. However, there are many cases (or stories) where the United States did not honor those property rights and those Mexican Americans sometimes complain, saying that what the United States did was unfair.

    Today, most of the southwestern United States is on land that used to belong to Mexico, and many of the people who live there are descendants (or grandchildren and great-grandchildren) of the people who lived there when the land was still part of Mexico. Mexican traditions (or old way of doing things) still affect life in those areas today. In fact, Mexican culture and traditions have had so much influence (or effect) on the southwestern United States that a style of cooking called Tex-Mex, which is short for Texas-Mexican, has become very popular not only in that part of the country, but all over the United States.

 

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