Maraya Rivera, a month away from her 15th birthday, knows the exact date she decided to break with family tradition.

“I had been to some of my friend’s quinces, and I thought to myself, I want a quince, a real quince,” she recalls. “I want to have a long dress and my own party where I can pick my own music.”

It didn’t matter that her mother and her mother’s mother had never hosted one. Hers would be a big celebration, with fancy flower centerpieces and a DJ spinning her favorite tunes.

Across town, Maria Chouza spent a good part of the past year planning her daughter Samantha’s quince celebration, held Saturday at the Renaissance Banquet Hall in Miami. Back in the day, Chouza, now 38, thought turning 15 meant fewer restrictions — not a big birthday bash. But for Samantha, a ninth-grader at Youth Women’s Preparatory Academy in Miami, it was all about the party.

“It’s a tradition that I wanted to experience,” Samantha says. “It’s about celebrating with your family.”

For Hispanic girls everywhere, the centuries-old tradition of a quinceañera is still alive and well, whether it’s at a lavish banquet hall or on the family’s backyard patio. In fact, these coming-of-age parties have become increasingly popular in the United States as a result of the growing Latino population and a couple of reality TV shows that focused on this romantic rite of passage.

“I’ve heard people say they are more important than a wedding because a quince is all about the girl and just about the girl,” says Silvio Herrera, who, as a comparative sociology graduate student at Florida International University, completed a thesis on the tradition. “That may be especially true in Miami because of the influence” of Hispanics.

Herrera, who was born and raised in Miami, spent many a weekend going to friends’ quince parties, including those of his two older sisters. “I don’t think it’s a tradition that is ever going to disappear,” he adds. “It may be expressed in other ways, maybe interpreted in a more modern fashion, but this is something that is uniquely ours and will stay that way.”

Experts believe the modern quinceañera traces its roots to Aztec and Mayan initiation rites, but the origins are obscure and there is no hard evidence that a girl’s 15th birthday coincided with the age of marriageability in those cultures.

“We can’t draw a straight line that says this started because of this particular ritual from this particular culture at this particular time,” says Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Miami who has lectured extensively on the subject.

Somewhere, somehow these native American traditions met with European court life and soon prominent families in colonial Latin America were introducing their daughters to society in debutante balls. You can still see vestiges of these colonial customs in some of the party rituals — the father-daughter waltz, the girl’s tiara and long gown, her entourage of damas (ladies) and chambelanes (escorts).

In Cuba, the lavishness of a girl’s quince depended on her family’s economic standing. During his research, Herrera found that parties on the island ran the spectrum, from a sumptuous ball at the Havana Yacht Club to a simple brindis (toast) in the family’s living room. “In Cuba, you didn’t have those over-the-top quinces by people who couldn’t always afford them,” Herrera says.