This text is a transcription of the author’s presentation at the International Congress “Doing Education. La actualidad de Paulo Freire a cien años de sus nacimiento (1921-2021)”, held in May 2021 at the University of Siena. In it, the generational and political context of the emergence and development of Paulo Freire’s thought is reviewed, as well as what it has become in the proposals of Latin American social movements and of the critical and popular pedagogy that has been deployed globally from the inspiration and permanent resignification of Freire’s legacy.