52,000 acres there before he went back to spain to get married. history is full of examples of countries seizing very large tracks of land on their borders that then create so-called border problems for a very long time. some of them very violent problems in some parts of the world. california was a forbidding place for americans to get to before it was a state, and it was a difficult enough place to live in that americans did not want to. california couldn't actually qualify for statehood until it had a population of at least 60,000 united states citizens living there, a number that was just impossible for california to attract. and then gold was discovered in california, the california that used to be mexico.