Accounts of U.S. rhetorical citizenship often favor performative frameworks over frameworks imposed by nation states through law. In favoring performative accounts that emphasize the agency of those enacting citizenship, the nation state is bracketed. These accounts argue that citizenship is not only a what codified in law, but also a where, a who, and a how. As a body marked at birth as Mexicano and at birth and life in the U.S. as a (not)citizen, however, I am put in the position that in order to perform citizenship I need to perform (not)being. How could citizenship be theorized from this position of (not)being instead of bracketing the power of the nation state and thereby excluding those for whom legal citizenship is an impossibility? My account is an effort to emphasize the incommensurability that citizenship has with (not)citizens in relation to the territory claimed by colonial settler nation states while integrating an additional interrogative pronoun: a when of citizenship.