I can’t speak extensively about a tradition of virgin veneration that is specific to Latin America (though I don’t doubt that there are contemporary features of virgin veneration that are theologically and/or culturally unique to that region) but belief in the “perpetual virginity” of Mary and the broader veneration paid toward, essentially, “saintly virgins,” is hardly a modern phenomenon (for example, tomorrow (November 22) is the feast day of St. Cecilia, one of the most famous of the early Christian "virgin martyrs" whose cult was massive in the third and fourth centuries). In fact, I would probably push this point further and say that it is, at least generally speaking, somewhat less of a phenomenon in contemporary Christianity than it was during the early and medieval centuries of the Church.

I think you are intending to ask about the idea of the “perpetual virginity” of Mary in particular (i.e. the idea that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life even after giving birth to Christ), but because of the way that you phrase your question I first want to clarify a point regarding the origin of the idea that Mary was a virgin at all. You rightly point out the New Testament’s mentions of Jesus’ siblings (a point of scholarly controversy in itself which I will address later on in this response), but you also seem to express some potential confusion about the origin of Mary’s identity as a virgin with respect to her giving birth to Christ. For clarity’s sake, I just want to point out the two main New Testament passages that serve as the relatively straightforward sources of Christian belief (across denominational lines) in the virginity of Mary with respect to Christ’s birth, which are Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-38.

The claim that Mary remained a perpetual virgin throughout her life, however, has induced a significant amount of historical and theological controversy. The idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin is unquestionably an ancient one, dating to at least the second century. As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, the ancientness of the idea is precisely what got Erasmus into trouble during the early sixteenth century when he voiced doubt about scriptural support for Mary’s perpetual virginity, and MacCulloch makes a more fundamental point about the nature of the perpetual virginity of Mary as a formal dogmatic teaching of the Church when he highlights the controversial distinction between Scripture and Tradition that represented a key fault line during the Protestant Reformation. Macculoch’s book is The Reformation: A History, and though I quibble (for unrelated reasons) more than some scholars do with portions of his historiography in certain sections, it is nonetheless an eminently readable history of the event. I would argue that there is perhaps no better way of becoming acquainted with the controversy surrounding the question of Mary’s perpetual virginity than by approaching it through the lens of the Reformation, as prior to the Reformation and subsequent centuries, there existed relatively little theological controversy about the claim, at least after it became the orthodox view of both the Eastern and Western Churches during the first few centuries of Christianity. (Though Tertullian does represent one example of a major early Church figure who did not hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary.)

As mentioned, belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity was present at least as early as the second century- on this point, in addition to a large number of Patristic writings from the likes of Origen, Augustine, and others, see the text of the “Gospel of James,” a Mary-focused document composed sometime during the second century that attested to Mary’s perpetual virginity and influenced the development of numerous other Mariological teachings. By the time of the fifth-century Council of Ephesus, teaching regarding the perpetual virginity of Mary was firmly established and would mostly be solidified in subsequent centuries, facing no significant theological challenges (in the east or the west) until the Protestant Reformation.

The 2007 book Virginity Revisited (ed. by Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher) contains an excellent and relevant fifth chapter contributed by patristic scholar Kate Cooper, subtitled “Only Virgins Can Give Birth to Christ: The Virgin Mary and the Problem of Female Authority in Late Antiquity.” Here Cooper makes the important point that much of the significance given to particular teachings and beliefs related to Mary stemmed from their possible implications on theological questions relating to the nature of Christ. As she puts it, historical theology has “long treated the ancient sources on Mary as of interest predominately for their Christological implications” (101). This highlights a point of general significance for the issue at hand: the particular teaching about Mary’s perpetual virginity or lack thereof was deemed especially significant due largely to a sense among early Christians that the status of Mary’s virginity carried with it theological importance and reflected something about who Christ was. For a quick example of this type of debate, I point you back to MacCulloch, who notes the use by early theologians of an “allegorical” reading of Ezekiel 44:2 (this was mentioned especially by Augustine) that discussed the “shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter.” (The Reformation, 101).

Before concluding, I will finish by briefly addressing the “siblings of Jesus” controversy. Both Mark and Matthew mention the “brothers” of Jesus, and as Raymond Brown puts it in his classic Introduction to the New Testament, if one had “only the New Testament, one would assume that they were the children of Mary and Joseph” (725, note 2). But he follows this point up by acknowledging the previously mentioned Gospel of James and other early beliefs to the contrary. In the East, reconciliation between the apparently contradictory attestation to the existence of “brothers” of Jesus and belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary was done by identifying Jesus’ brothers as children of Joseph from a prior marriage. From the West, largely due to Jerome’s influence in the fourth and fifth centuries, came the idea that these “brothers” should actually be thought of as cousins on the basis of translational and contextual argumentation.