Crystal City is the county seat of Zavala County, Texas, and the largest community in the lightly populated South Texas region known as the Winter Garden. Located about 110 miles southwest of San Antonio, the city grew up along a railroad line in the early twentieth century as a farming and ranching center, and its fortunes have long been tied to the irrigated vegetable fields that surround it. The city's best-known identity is its spinach. Introduced to the area around the winter of 1917–18, spinach thrived in the Winter Garden's mild climate and irrigation systems, and Crystal City promoted itself as the "Spinach Capital of the World." The crop became a defining part of local culture, commemorated each November with the annual Spinach Festival, which was interrupted by World War II and revived in 1982. Crystal City also holds a significant place in American civil rights history. In 1969, Mexican American students walked out of the city's schools to demand equal treatment, launching a movement that spread across South Texas. The activism that followed helped make Crystal City the birthplace of La Raza Unida Party, a third-party political movement founded by local organizers including José Ángel Gutiérrez that campaigned for Chicano representation across Texas in the 1970s. Today Crystal City remains a small, predominantly Mexican American community of roughly 6,300 residents, anchored by agriculture, county government, and its public schools. It offers a quiet, close-knit small-town way of life in the South Texas brush country, with the Mexican border community of Eagle Pass and the larger city of San Antonio within driving distance. The surrounding Winter Garden's farms, hunting leases, and ranchland shape both the local economy and the outdoor recreation available to residents, from dove and deer hunting to fishing on area waterways.