"We sustain ourselves through the histories of our ancestors" is an installation that questions the viability of hashtag activism in an era of networked culture. Working through gestures of presence and absence, this installation remembers the life and work of trans Latinx activist Sylvia Rivera, a womxn fiercely committed to engaging in activism related to housing displacement, incarceration, abuse, and income inequality within LGBTQ+ spaces. Foregrounding one of the few captured moments of Rivera where she highlights the structural inequalities within the LGBTQ movement following the Stonewall Riots, this work scans the Twitterverse for instances of the hashtag #lgbtq and advances the video frame by frame at each tweet using that hashtag. Immediately tethered to the frequency and prominence of #lgbtq, the image of her call to action is frozen to a still when the hashtag is no longer in use, pausing intermittently as the conversation subsides.