ABSTRACT
The dreary social history up to 1915 contributed a share in making the revolutionary work of Alvarado and Carrillo appear to be a "strange exotic thing." Socialism was a many-faceted movement drawn from various places in the world, but Yucatecan reformers tried to adapt it to the needs of the Peninsula. Any marked success in the reform movement depended to a great extent upon leadership that could provide a strong organization with a high degree of centralization while also developing a decentralized grass roots spirit in the Leagues. Alvarado's revolutionary zeal was viewed with great distrust by the complacent segment of the populace whose primary goal was to keep the Peninsula free of Revolution. Alvarado and Carrillo helped the masses begin to establish concrete goals in the way that Zapata had done in Morelos. When rigidity between would-be reformers and anti-reformers hardens into the condition it had in pre-Revolutionary Yucatan, the choices open to either side are few.
