Yaretzi?

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

On NameBerry they had a post briefly mentioning some fast-rising names in the US and one of them was Yaretzi (f).

I did a double take because I had never heard that name before, nor could I at all identify where it came from.

I Googled around, and found the following:
1. Name sites (and people explaining why they picked the name) claim that its origin is Aztec/Nahuatl. However, as a discussion on BehindTheName points out, this is doubtful because Nahuatl doesn't have an [r] sound. (Wikipedia confirms this.) The claimed meaning is "you are beloved."
2. Without exception, every Yaretzi I found had Hispanic rest of the name.
3. It is the name of a Mexican traditional dance company; the site is in Spanish which I don't speak.

Could anyone shed some light on this name, particularly Spanish speakers? My initial suspicion was that this was the name of a character on a Spanish language soap opera (as those soap operas tend to be sources of many names that rocket to popularity, and then usually just as quickly the name vanishes from the popularity list when the show goes off the air) but I couldn't find anything suggesting that when Googling in English.

My big questions are:
1. What is the REAL origin of Yaretzi (since it seems impossible for it to be Nahuatl)? Is it made up?
2. What caused the name to go from completely unknown to top 300 in 5 years in the US?
3. When did the name start getting used?

(I also kind of think it's ugly sounding. Maybe because my maiden name also has the /tz/ sound and I've always found it a bit ugly. Also, I have to concur with the most common English speaker complaint about it, which is that it sounds like Yahtzee.)

Comments

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

Actually Nevaeh's popularity origin is well documented. The explosion can be directly traced to the appearance of Sonny Sandoval on MTV Cribs, where he revealed his daughter's name and explained the origin (heaven backwards). Now from there it went viral, but nonetheless there is generally some original catalyst that brings a rare name to mass attention. That's why I specifically mentioned soap operas--they're a well-known source for fad names.

[ma-ee-uh.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK. You should ask this question to some folks from Latin America then.