A variant of Citlali or Xitlali, adapted through Spanish spelling traditions from a name meaning 'star.'
Xitllali is a name of profound Nahuatl heritage, a variant of Citlali or Citlalli, which translates directly as "star" from the classical Nahuatl word "citlalin." Nahuatl was the lingua franca of the Aztec empire and remains spoken today by over one and a half million people in Mexico, making it one of the most linguistically vital of all indigenous American languages. For the Mexica (Aztec) civilization, stars held cosmological and calendrical significance far beyond the decorative — the night sky was a living map of divine order, and the star goddess Citlalicue ("she of the star skirt") was one of the primordial creator deities in the Nahuatl creation narrative.
To name a child "star" was to place them within this vast cosmological frame. The X in Xitllali follows the original orthographic convention of colonial-era Nahuatl, in which X represented the "sh" sound (pronounced roughly "shee-TLA-lee"), preserving the phonetics of the original language against later Hispanicized spellings. This makes Xitllali not an invented or decorative modification but the more authentically rooted form of the name.
In contemporary Mexico and among Mexican-American communities, names of Nahuatl origin — Xochitl, Citlali, Itzzel, Tlalli — have experienced a powerful cultural revival as expressions of indigenous identity and pride. Xitllali carries all of this: astronomical wonder, a living language's survival, and the particular beauty of a name that has been spoken under the same stars for centuries.