Crystal City: Spinach Capital and Political Uprising

Crystal City calls itself the Spinach Capital of the World, and it earned the title: spinach cultivation took hold in Zavala County early in the twentieth century, and by the nineteen thirties thousands of seasonal workers were cycling through to harvest winter spinach, spring onions, and summer beets. The town is also where the Chicano political movement found its most dramatic electoral breakthrough. On January seventeenth, nineteen seventy, José Ángel Gutiérrez and three hundred activists met at Campestre Hall and founded La Raza Unida Party.

Within months the party had won city council and school board majorities in Crystal City and nearby towns, demonstrating for the first time that Mexican American communities in south Texas could organize independent political power. Gutiérrez, born in nineteen forty-four, graduated from Crystal City High School.