It was a lyric about Reggie Kray that really stumped Camilo Lara. Translating Morrissey lyrics into Spanish had been proving tricky enough for the Mexican Institute of Sound DJ, what with Moz’s fondness for black humour and elegant phrasing. But the east London criminal namechecked in Last of the Famous International Playboys? Nobody in Mexico City was likely to know who he was.

“Thankfully, we also have a bunch of amazing crooks here,” Lara says, laughing. “We’re world famous for that!” And so he began scouring Mexico’s criminal history for an appropriate match. Eventually, he plumped for Rafael Caro Quintero, a notorious drug cartel boss known to cover his misdeeds with acts of philanthropy: funding highways; building hospitals in impoverished areas.

“He was very loved in the north of Mexico,” Lara says, “so he became my version of Reggie Kray.”

You may ask why Lara was going to such painstaking detail to translate Morrissey’s back catalogue. That will become apparent in the UK on Saturday, when the Barbican in London hosts Mexrrissey, a night of Smiths and Morrissey songs given added spice by a band of Mexican musicians put together by Lara. Inspired by the huge, reciprocal connection between Morrissey and his devoted Latino fanbase, Lara wanted to bring the flavours of cumbia and mariachi to the Moz canon, but was determined not to do so cheaply.

“I would hate to see a cheesy Mexican tribute to Morrissey,” he says. “I knew I had to use well-known Mexican artists” – among others, the group features underground icon Chetes, trumpet player Alex Escobar and Cafe Tacuba’s violinist Alejandro Flores – “and to mix it with electronic elements and other non-Mexican elements. To just play these songs with mariachi trumpets would be touristic – we didn’t want to come and dress in ponchos.”

Lara first conceived the idea for Mexrrissey four years ago, when he was asked to remix Morrissey’s song Someone Is Squeezing My Skull and realised how many crossed lines there were between his favourite singer and traditional Mexican music.

“Mexico is a melodramatic country,” he explains. “We love drama and tension and irony. In a way, his music is very similar to a telenovela [Mexican soap opera]. I wouldn’t say Morrissey’s songs are about losers, but they are about the people who never win, and unfortunately I live in a country where we always come fourth or fifth in competitions, we are never the stars of the show.”

This identification with the underdog – not to mention Morrissey’s unique ability to articulate feelings of not belonging – is why so many first- and second-generation Mexican Americans feel so strongly about the singer. The LA subculture, in which Chicanos style their own Morrissey quiffs, tattoo his lyrics on their arm and graffiti his image around downtown LA, has been around since the Smiths first split, but was brought to wider attention in 2005 thanks to William E Jones’s documentary Is It Really So Strange?

If that story is old, it goes on: there are currently numerous radio stations and club nights running in the city, not to mention a MorrisseyOKE night in which Mexican-Americans line up to perform from a Moz-only roster. Last year, Morrissey tribute band Sweet and Tender Hooligans, who have been performing since 1992, found themselves playing to a packed crowd at the Rose Bowl stadium before the friendly between LA Galaxy and Manchester United.

‘Who is more emotional than Morrissey?’ … the man himself. Photograph: Pedro Gomes

The band’s lead singer, Jose Maldonado, is known as “the Mexican Morrissey” and points to several reasons Chicanos identify with the singer, from his Catholic roots to his love of working-class sports such as football and boxing. Most importantly, he says, Mexicans tend to “gravitate towards emotional subjects in music and who is more emotional than Morrissey? Though Mexicans put on a tough front, we can be reduced to tears by the beauty of a sad song about unrequited love or loss.”

The stereotypical view of macho Latino culture may seem at odds with Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and sensitive lyrics, but music has long acted as an outlet that allows Mexicans – not just Morrissey fans – to pour out their hearts. Lara cites Juan Gabriel, a Mexican pop icon whom he believes is very similar to Morrissey in that “he talks about we fall in love, in such a beautiful way. I think it’s funny that for such a macho country, one of our most important icons is someone who plays a lot with sexuality.”

Lara says that, growing up in Mexico City during the 90s, with issues of Q or NME hard to come by, most alternative fans had a simple choice to make between the bands you could easily hear about: you either liked the Cure or the Smiths (as a DJ he tried to straddle both, but his heart lay with Morrissey). When I suggest that most British people would find it hard to associate these bands with anything other than the perma-grey skies of England, he reminds me that “it rains in Mexico City probably 200 times a year! We’re just as gloomy as you, we just have a great international promotion that makes people think it’s sunny and hot.”

One place that most definitely is sunny and hot is Tucson, Arizona, home to “indie mambo” band Sergio Mendoza Y La Orkesta, who combine cumbia and merengue with the Mexican folk music known as ranchera. Mendoza, who also plays live with Calexico, was 18 and living in the US border town of Nogales when he first heard the Smiths and immediately began watching their videos over and over. Lara asked him to help arrange the music for Mexrrissey, yet despite knowing the songs inside out, the multi-instrumentalist still encountered difficulties when it came to the melodies and vocal patterns.

“They are so different from most pop music,” he says. “Morrissey tends to fit so many words in a sentence and it makes it challenging to even sing along with him while listening to his recordings.”

Sometimes the lyrics simply couldn’t fit in Spanish, so he had to decide whether to sacrifice a small part of melody or a small part of meaning. More often than not, though, Lara and Mendoza found that Morrissey’s songs were perfectly suited for a Mex-over, and not just the obvious ones such as Mexico or First of the Gang To Die.

“Everyday Is Like Sunday is completely a mariachi song,” says Lara. “They have the same structure, and the synth line is totally replaceable with a trumpet.” Panic, on the other hand, has more in common with [the music of northern Mexico] norteño: “It has a similar rhythm, you just need to add some accordion.”

They hope the end results will entertain, but also highlight the links between these two most passionate forms of music. And it’s not just the audience who will emerge having learned something. Lara says he got to grips with English partly through listening to the Beatles, but that studying Morrissey in detail took things to the next level.

“He likes to use a lot of long words,” he says. “So through this project, I’ve certainly learned a lot about English!”

Mexrrissey: Mexico goes Morrissey takes place at the Barbican, London, on 25 April. It then tours Nottingham (27), Bristol (28), Cambridge (29), Coventry (30) and Manchester (1 May). For more information visit lalineafestival.com.