For reconquista junkies who want more than just this, here’s the op-ed I wrote almost a dozen years ago, celebrating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally ended the Mexican-American War:
The treaty, however, deserves to be honored as one of the great American accomplishments of the 19th century, the single most important step in fulfilling the United States’ Manifest Destiny as a country spreading across a continent from sea to shining sea. It placed an enormous amount of mostly unsettled land within the jurisdiction of the United States, including all of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, as well as parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wyoming – thereby securing the benefits of peace, prosperity, and American citizenship for the region’s future inhabitants.