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Cotulla is the county seat of La Salle County, Texas, on Interstate 35 in the South Texas brush country.

The town was named for Joseph Cotulla, a Polish immigrant who, learning the International-Great Northern Railroad planned to build into La Salle County, donated 120 acres in 1881 to induce the railroad to come; a depot was built in 1882 and town lots began to sell.

Cotulla was designated the county seat in a special election in 1883, and by 1890 it had about 1,000 residents, three general stores, two weekly newspapers, two churches, a bank, a corn mill, and a cotton gin.

The young town developed a reputation as a rough place, even as it built schools and civic institutions; its economy was based for decades on sheep and cattle ranching.

In 1928–29, a 20-year-old Lyndon B. Johnson took his first teaching job at Cotulla's segregated Welhausen School, teaching poor Mexican-American children; the poverty he witnessed there shaped his later civil rights and education policies as president.

Johnson returned to Cotulla as president in 1966, 38 years after he taught there, to speak at the Welhausen School during National Education Week.

The Brush Country Museum, sponsored by the La Salle County Historical Commission in the center of town, preserves the area's ranching history and a photograph of founder Joseph Cotulla.

During the Eagle Ford Shale boom of the early 2010s, Cotulla's population temporarily swelled to more than 10,000 as oilfield workers flooded the small town.

Cotulla counted 3,718 residents in the 2020 census; Census survey data show its households are large, averaging about 3.8 persons, and more than nine in ten residents are Hispanic or Latino.