The article proposes a comparative reading of La vida de Dominguito, by Domingo Sarmiento, and its 1944 filmic transposition, entitled Su mejor alumno and written by Homero Manzi and Ulyses Petit de Murat. To that end, we explore the continuities and changes in the images of Sarmiento and Dominguito that both works posit. Firstly, the movie is presented as a staging of Sarmiento’s image shift from the popular education project to pop culture. Secondly, we suggest that the son image in both works supports a political community based on the ethical ideal of the philia. However, the failure of such communitarian model is determined by the act of filicide, which –through the metaphor of an infant people which cannot outgrow its own infancy– enables a reading of the film related to the sociohistorical context in which Sarmiento’s pop image emerged along with the formation of Peronism