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Back in Guatemala — when Raul Reyes was 13 years old and sell­ing sliced coconuts on the buses go­ing to Quetzal­tenango — a mango smooth­ie was a simple thing. There was a guy standing on the corner, usu­ally, with a card table before him and, under­neath it, a crate of mangoes yanked from some nearby tree. He chopped the fruit right before your eyes and mixed in ice, then you paid him a few quetzals and stepped away sucking on a straw, sa­vor­ing that sweet, cold ache in your throat.

Today, a mango smooth­ie is a differ­ent mat­ter entirely for Reyes, who is 35 and who, for 16 years, has been living in greater Wash­ington. Since 2004, Reyes has been the general man­ag­er of the McDonald's at 2 I St. SE, near Nationals Park, and today, on the first of­ficial day of summer, McDonald's is do­ing a nationwide roll­out of a new bev­erage: the mango pineapple smooth­ie. The chain is about to launch a Re­al Fruit Smooth­ie Fu­sion Tour that will vis­it 38 cities, and an impos­ing de­liv­ery guy in steel-tipped boots and black shorts brought Reyes 3,800 servings of con­centrate from a dis­trib­utor in Man­assas.

The 82 workers on Reyes's staff, most of whom are paid be­tween $8.25 and $9.50 an hour with­out med­ical ben­efits, have all been apprised of the smooth­ie's arrival. Indeed, they have under­gone smooth­ie video train­ing, for like nearly all new McDonald's prod­ucts, the bev­erage has landed with expectations dictated from on high. The I Street McDonald's is be­ing urged to sell 300 mango pineapple smooth­ies a day. Each or­der should be filled with­in 50 sec­onds — there are electron­ic clocks attached to the cash reg­is­ters that will help mon­itor whether the kitchen staff is meeting that goal.

But right now, at 7:30 a.m., Reyes is post­ing the smooth­ie signage sent by corporate. He has a staffer — Ramiro Rivera, from Mexico — up on the roof, jockeying a 4-by-6-foot, lime-green banner into place on the red tile. Reyes and I are standing be­low in the swel­tering heat, in the parking lot, each of us holding cradling our own sample smooth­ies.

Reyes is a small man — stout, with a bris­tle-brush haircut and a sparse black mustache. He has a gen­tle, easy grin, and he greets his customers with a so­licitous pride. "What you think?" he asks, ges­tur­ing to­ward my mostly gone smooth­ie.

"Pretty good," I say. "Not bad." And then we look up, both of us, as Rivera bat­tens the banner down with rope. "Bueno," Reyes shouts skyward. "Per­fecto."

All around us, the cars idle and lurch. There will be a line at the drive-through all morning long.

* * *

Two I Street is an American success story. Built in the early 1980s, the restaurant was bought in 2003 by Cuban-born Car­los Mateos, who spent $375,000 on a ren­ovation that expanded the drive-through and updated the in­te­rior. Annual sales, which totaled $2.4 million eight years ago, have dou­bled. I Street is now one of the bus­i­est McDonald's in greater Wash­ington. I spent five days at the restaurant in June, in­tent on meeting workers such as Raul Reyes who, in pursu­ing their own American dreams, had attached them­selves to the McDonald's jug­ger­naut. Eighty per­cent of Reyes's workers are from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador. (Im­migrants — both doc­u­mented and undoc­u­mented — account for about 25 per­cent of all workers in the food ser­vices indus­try, and that number is ris­ing.)

What is it like to grow up in, say, rural Guatemala, in a tranquil, small town, with only a few houses nearby, and then em­igrate north, to work under fluo­res­cent lights, sating the de­mands of rambunctious chil­dren craving Happy Meals? How does a newcom­er reckon with pour­ing dozens of large Cokes ev­ery hour as french fries sizzle in grease and six or eight of his co-workers scramble about fill­ing or­ders, shout­ing, "Big Mac, Big Mac, Big Mac, Quar­ter Pounder With Cheese?"

McDonald's is, af­ter Wal-Mart, the nation's sec­ond-largest private employer, with 700,000 workers. And as the econ­o­my flags, and as more Americans seek cheap­er food, that number is ris­ing. On April 19, McDonald's held a National Hiring Day and says that it brought in 62,000 new employees.

"We've got flexible sched­ules, ben­efits and jobs that can turn into satisfying ca­reers," McDonald's' Web site said. Yet many people above the poverty line would nev­er even consid­er working at McDonald's. The stigma of working at McDonald's is so cultur­ally ingrained that since 2001 the Oxford En­glish Dictio­nary has de­fined the neol­o­gism "McJob" as "an unstim­u­lating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. cre­ated by the expan­sion of the ser­vice sector."

La­bor advocates are pre­dictably in lockstep with the OED. "McDonald's is no worse than Burg­er King or Wendy's or anyone else in the fast-food indus­try," says Jose Oliva, national pol­icy co­or­dinator for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which advocates for food ser­vice workers nationwide. "But it pays the low­est wages pos­sible. It starts people at minimum wage and then keeps them at a low wage for as long as they can get away with it." (Minimum wage is $8.25 in the Dis­trict and $7.55 nationwide. Accord­ing to the Bu­reau of La­bor Statis­tics, 4.36 million American workers are paid minimum wage or less.)

Cather­ine Ruckelshaus, who also advocates for low-wage workers as a lawyer for the National Employ­ment Law Project, says McDonald's of­ten find ways to get kitchen staffers to work off the clock.

She points to a class action suit brought against McDonald's in 2008 by more than 2,200 employees in Delaware. In November, a U.S. dis­trict court judge ended the suit by approving a settle­ment that awarded each worker be­tween $675 and $1,100. McDonald's admitted no liability in the settle­ment, which cost the corporation $2.4 million.

"In today's econ­o­my," she says, "restaurants like McDonald's can get away with it because workers are fight­ing over the last scraps of employ­ment." She says that McDonald's should em­ulate In-N-Out Burg­er, a California-based regional chain. In-N-Out starts kitchen workers at $10 an hour and soon offers them 401(k) plans and paid vacation time.

But Dave Carroll, se­nior di­rector of compen­sa­tion for McDonald's, argues that it's not fair to com­pare McDonald's to a small­er chain — or to blame McDonald's for the infractions of its fran­chises. In a written state­ment he pro­vided me, he said: "The major­ity of McDonald's U.S. restaurants are independently owned and op­erated. As independent busi­ness people, McDonald's fran­chisees make their own deci­sions regard­ing hiring, wages, and ben­efits for their employees."

Carroll added: "McDonald's and our fran­chisees offer com­pet­itive pay and ben­efits. In fact, in most cases we pay high­er than minimum wage. … Rest as­sured, we val­ue our employees, their well-be­ing, and the con­tri­butions they make to our local busi­nesses, and our community, ev­ery day. … Our people are, and always have been, a top prior­ity."

* * *

On I Street, the workers la­bored with an as­sembly-line ef­ficiency. On my first morning there, Reyes explained that each or­der appears in­stantly on two screens: one behind the counter, an­oth­er back in the kitchen. He noted that each cash reg­is­ter trans­action typically takes 12 sec­onds. Then he showed me how a mold­ed hood on the stove clamps down on eight meat patties and sizzles them into identical and infinitely replica­ble brown orbs.

"How long do they cook for?" I asked.

"Thirty-eight sec­onds," he said, with de­light.

Reyes's job at McDonald's is a dream come true. He told me that af­ter he sneaked across the Mexican bor­der in 1995 to join his broth­er in Wash­ington, he stood out­side a 7-Eleven in Silver Spring each morning, hop­ing to land gigs moving fur­ni­ture or digging ditches. "I'd get there at 5," he said, "and ev­ery time a car pulled up, I'd jump right in. But people always said: 'No, you're too young to work. You should be in school.' By 10 or 11, I'd have noth­ing. I'd go home broke."

He got a jan­ito­rial job, eventually, and cleaned office buildings from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. each weeknight. When at last he landed a $5.25-an-hour job at McDonald's, he was "jump­ing up and down like crazy. I called my moth­er," he said. "In my country, McDonald's is a big restaurant — you need a col­lege degree to work there."

Af­ter his first day at McDonald's, Reyes says, "my feet hurt, my back, my whole body." That was prob­a­bly because he was still jan­itor­ing. For six years he worked both jobs, earning enough to turn his 1996 Honda Accord into a sleek street rac­er replete with hydraulics, three televi­sion sets and neon-green running lights. He painted the vehicle three times; at one point, it was lemon green with a purple hood. He learned En­glish from a secu­rity guard who fol­lowed him from room to room as he cleaned, point­ing, saying, "Table. Chair. Desk."

In time, Reyes was tapped to be a jan­ito­rial super­vi­sor, but by then, he had im­pressed his McDonald's boss, Car­los Mateos. "He was am­bi­tious," says Mateos, who owns 11 Wash­ington area stores. "He was one of those people who was nev­er con­tent with where he was at. If he was in the grill, he wanted to know how to work the fryer. If he was in the fryer, he wanted to know what was go­ing on up front." Reyes climbed quickly through the McDonald's hi­er­ar­chy — he became a crew trainer, then a swing man­ag­er, then a sec­ond as­sistant man­ag­er — and in 2000, Mateos made him man­ag­er at his 1235 New York Ave. NW store. "He was hands-on," Mateos says. "If he sent his guys to the roof to clean the AC unit, he'd grab the degreas­er and help."

In 2001, Mateos gave Reyes an ul­timatum. "It's time for you to choose be­tween your two jobs," he said. Reyes chose McDonald's. As a cleaning super­vi­sor, he'd need to write reports in En­glish. The prospect scared him; he had only a ninth-grade ed­ucation.

When he took over I Street and its staff in 2004, he worked three months with­out a day off. He shored up the inventory practices; no one was keeping records on, for in­stance, how many hamburg­ers were dropped on the floor. He fired 40 of the restaurant's 72 workers. "People didn't like me, but they were giving away free food," he said. "They were taking mon­ey from the cash reg­is­ter like they were ATM mach­ines." He began tapping the Latino grapevine for employees. The neighbor­hood gen­tri­fied. Nearby low-income hous­ing was demol­ished. Nationals Park opened in 2008, and Reyes rose me­teor­ically.

In 2009, he received a Ray Kroc Award, giv­en to the top 1 per­cent of the man­agers at the 14,000 McDonald's nationwide. McDonald's flew him to Chicago. The three-day trip was, he says, "some­thing I'll nev­er for­get. They picked me up in a li­mou­sine. They took me to the number one ho­tel in Chicago, the Sheraton, and the room I was in — it had ev­ery­thing, even a TV in the bath­room. I felt like a rich man." Reyes's wife was invited. "She couldn't get the time off," he says. She works at an­oth­er McDonald's.

Reyes, who has three small chil­dren, makes $39,000 a year man­aging a restaurant that grosses $5.2 million a year. Cat­ego­rized technically as a le­galized alien, he gets med­ical ben­efits from McDonald's.

Of­ten, he is entan­gled in the lives of employees who earn consid­erably less than he does: "Sometimes I'll have people tell me, 'I sent mon­ey to my fam­ily in El Salvador, and now I don't have enough to take the Metro home,' " he says. "I tell them, 'Don't ev­er take mon­ey from the drawer. I can just give you the $5.' And I do."

At times, Reyes needs to have diffi­cult talks with employees about the pace of their work. "If you're at the drive-through and your sales last year were faster, I let you know," he said. "It might not be their fault — if you have a customer who stalls, looking on the floor of their car for quar­ters, that runs your time up. Still, I have to tell them. Sometimes la­bor costs are high. They tell me, 'You can't spend over $50,000 on la­bor this month,' and I'm at 60 and I have to let people go. I tell them, 'Sorry, but it's a bad time com­ing up.' It's hard, but in this job you have to work with your brain, not your body. If you work with your body, you won't meet your goals.

"There's pressure on me," Reyes added. "Sometimes you have customers trying to get free food. They pick up a receipt from the floor and say, 'I or­dered this. Where is it?' Sometimes lit­tle kids slip on the floor and get hurt. Junkies overdose in the bath­room. There's no WiFi; the AC is down. Two weeks ago, it was 100 degrees out­side and 110 in the restaurant, and ev­erybody was swearing. Sometimes I just think, 'No more McDonald's. I want to go back to my country.' "

Both Starbucks and KFC have tried to lure Reyes away from McDonald's by offering him high­er-paying man­age­rial posts. But he has stayed on. He works 45 hours a week, of­ficially, but re­ally his job is 24-7. One re­cent morning he had to swing by the restaurant at 5:30 on his day off to con­tend with a bro­ken $5,000 toast­er. And when I vis­ited him one af­ter­noon at his two-bed­room rental in Petworth, he was mon­itor­ing I Street's 12 video cam­eras on his laptop on the couch, watch­ing a movie starring Snoop Dogg.

"Oh," I said, rec­ognizing the restaurant, "I just came from there."

"Yeah," said Reyes, smiling. "I know."

* * *

But sometimes there are hiccups in the McDonald's ma­ch­ine. One af­ter­noon, 32-year-old Marleney Ramirez was cleaning a small device that dispens­es cold milk for McDonald's oatmeal. The ves­sel con­tain­ing the milk was stuck in­side it; no one could dislodge it. Ramirez had to chip the ice around it with the han­dle end of a long met­al spoon. I watched as a publicist from Golin Harris watched me. (Golin, which con­tracts with McDonald's, would shad­ow me dur­ing my week at the restaurant: five days, five minders, each one a sharp-dress­ing young woman who took copious notes on my motions.)

Af­ter a half-hour, Ramirez began working the ma­ch­ine's most obstinate crevices with a bent-in-half plas­tic coffee stirring straw. The publicist, Kim Persad, was efferves­cent as she looked on. "McDonald's makes it oatmeal with milk," she exclaimed. "That's what makes it so good! That's why I like it so much! Starbucks uses wa­ter."

Ramirez wasn't lis­tening — like most of the workers at I Street, she under­stands lit­tle En­glish. Sev­en years ago, in her Salvadoran village, she was making roughly $1 an hour wash­ing clothes in a riv­er. She had done the same work since age 14, and the mon­ey she earned was not enough to support her two sons, then 8 and 7. She was a single moth­er.

So she did some hard reckoning: If she im­migrated to the United States, leav­ing her chil­dren with her par­ents, she could support them by sending home tuition mon­ey and American cloth­ing. "Sometimes I lay awake in bed until 1 or 2 in the morning, worrying over what was the right thing to do," she said. She arrived here in 2004 and at first she did jan­ito­rial work at a bank. The cleaning chem­icals made her sick. "At McDonald's, I feel happy," she said. "I am busy all day long, and I like that. It makes the time go by fast."

Ramirez has not seen her chil­dren in sev­en years. Like most I Street workers, she has temporary res­ident status; if she goes back to El Salvador, she cannot return to the United States. "Of course, I would love to bring my chil­dren here," she said. "One day. But only God knows when. I talk to them ev­ery day, but they don't like to send me photos." She giggled. "They are afraid I will think they are too skinny."

* * *

The kitchen kept crank­ing out Chicken McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. The cashiers kept ask­ing, "Would you like to add an apple pie to that or­der?" And the masses streamed in the door, hungry.

What you see, on a typical day at I Street, is the disparate American public in unre­hearsed form, slouch­ing to­ward a quick and for­gettable meal. Here are the guys from the Splash Car Wash next door; here are Air Force sol­diers in full bul­letproof camo. Here are po­lice offi­cers and secu­rity guards. Here is a uniformed Otis El­evator re­pairman, and here is a fam­ily of weary tourists about to hit the on ramp to Inter­state 395, right out front. From behind the counter, you see the under­side of their necks, as they all look up at the menu board.

The clientele is African American and white, largely, so their fleeting exchanges with the Latino staff are melting-pot mo­ments, usu­ally happy ones. One af­ter­noon, a flabby mid­dle-age white guy with a tele­phone headset latched to his skull wove to­ward the counter to fetch his to-go or­der from a young Latina. "Gracias, seño­ra. Ciao," he said with warm linguis­tic confu­sion. Lat­er, Thayne Currie, a 31-year-old as­trophysicist, wandered in from his con­do next door and paid for his iced coffee, $2.41, with exact change. As he plucked the coins from his palm, he wore a broad, oth­erwordly grin. I asked him what he found so amus­ing. "Oh, I don't know," Currie said. "When­ev­er I come here, I see the same people working. It's nice."

Sometimes there are dazzling mo­ments at 2 I St. They hap­pen, usu­ally, at the drive-through window, which is the person­al domain of the star employee Mar­vin Mateos, from Honduras. Mateos is 27. Back home, he played soccer for a farm team linked to Honduras's national squad. Today he is still lean and graceful — and pos­sessed of a la­dy-killing charm wor­thy of Lord Byron him­self. When a co-worker re­cently taught him the phrase "For sure," he turned it into a lasciv­i­ous cry rife with rolling r's and a cock-a-doo­dle-doo lilt — some­thing like "forrrr shore-oooo" — and unleashed it on ev­ery female who rolled to­ward his window. One woman, Terry Keyes, responded with sharp peals of laugh­ter as she wriggled ap­preciatively in her driv­er's seat. "He made me shimmy!" she shrieked. "He's so funny!"

"Mar­vin and I go way back," gushed Rachel Semmel, an aide to Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. "Way back."

Mateos, who has been at 2 I St. for three years, is the fastest worker there, accord­ing to Reyes, and the only one able to turn a task known as HBO — for Hand Bag Out — into the­ater. Almost invariably, he has food ready early, when the customer is 30 feet away. He holds the to-go bag, which is white, crisp and neatly top-fold­ed, far out the window, with his arm stiff. Then he gen­tly shakes the bag, as if to say, "Come 'n' get it" as the car surges to­ward the grub and its visceral joys.

He sang to him­self as he worked the iced tea ma­ch­ine and han­dled McMuffins. Under his breath, he taught him­self En­glish, chirp­ing, "Coffee! Coffee! I am making coffee!" The job did not own him — he owned the job.

Still, Mateos acted unim­pressed with life in the States. "In Honduras," he said, "I had six girlfriends at the same time, and I could be lazy. I lived with my fam­ily, and I only had to work when I felt like it. Here, you have to pay rent. You have bills. I have to work all the time, and I am still poor. People tell you that when you come to the U.S., you're go­ing to have a car and make lots of mon­ey. But that's not true — it's all lies." He spoke with swag­ger, but here and there a youthful unsureness shone through, as well. He kept gazing into my eyes, implor­ingly, to see if I was cool with his sourness. When I smiled, he high-fived me. "Party, buddy!" he said. "Party!"

A few minutes lat­er, Reyes summoned Mateos to the break room to be­gin studying for a new, el­evated po­sition, as a kitchen staff trainer. He sat in front of a com­put­er taking a mul­ti­ple-choice Span­ish-language quiz about McDonald's sales vol­umes: "How many pounds of fish did McDonald's buy in 2007?" (Correct answer: 110,231,131.) Mateos gazed to­ward the ceiling, pensively. How many french fries sold in 2007? The number 5,400,000,000 appeared on the screen and, along with it, a lit­tle diagram showing that, placed end to end, the fries would stretch all the way to the moon and halfway back. He stared at the screen in guile­less aston­ish­ment, with his mouth agape.

* * *

One af­ter­noon, when I was sitting in the break room lis­tening to a single mom la­ment how she had to pay a babysitter $20 to spell her dur­ing each shift at McDonald's, Reyes called the woman sharply from the kitchen. She was two minutes late punch­ing in. "Raul es malo," the woman hissed as she tugged on her work hat. "Raul is bad." Like­wise, a cashi­er complained, "With Raul, it's always hurry, hurry, hurry."

A certain tautness per­vades I Street. The social con­tracts — be­tween McDonald's and its employees, and be­tween the restaurant and its customers — are kept to the letter. One af­ter­noon at the drive-through, I came across a man who had been short-changed by a cashi­er. I asked how much he was owed. "Forty-five cents," he said con­temptuously as he await­ed his due, which came quickly, with an apology.

The same day, Tracee Taylor, an emergency med­ical aide for the D.C. Fire De­part­ment, appeared at the counter, al­leg­ing that an I Street kitchen error had thrown her into anaphylactic shock that morning. "I'm al­ler­gic to sea salt," Taylor said, "and so I asked not to put salt on my Steak, Egg and Cheese Bagel. But they did anyway."

McDonald's doesn't use sea salt. Still, Taylor had just come from the hos­pital bearing a doctor's pre­scription on which she'd scrawled the phone number of a lawyer.

Lat­er, I asked Reyes if he was worried about a lawsuit. We were sitting at his dinner table, eating Salvadoran dishes that his wife, Zonia, had pre­pared for us, and he just shrugged. "People sue McDonald's all the time," he said. "It's no big deal. You want an­oth­er pupusa?"

* * *

Amid the constant activ­ity at I Street, there was only one per­son who always seemed calm. Saun­der Field, 50, works the cash reg­is­ter for the drive-through window, usu­ally. He is a ret­i­cent African American of medium build, and he is the only re­main­ing crew member who predates Raul Reyes's 2004 arrival. Field is not quite sure when he began on I Street. He knows only that he got there before his daugh­ter, Tameka, was born 18 years ago.

I became aware of Field one day when a pair of Mormon mis­sion­ar­ies dropped by for lunch, intimating that they'd made frequent vis­its to Field's home. "He gained a tes­ti­mo­ny," said a young man whose lapel badge read El­der Kunzle. "He was baptized in March."

"They've got a comfort­able place," Field told me, de­scrib­ing his vis­its to a local tabernacle. "They make me feel like fam­ily."

Field lives with his disabled moth­er and his sis­ter. In the early 1990s, he began taking classes at the Uni­versity of the Dis­trict of Columbia. But he had to work two jobs then to come up with enough mon­ey for tuition. "I worked til 10 ev­ery night, cleaning at the Aus­tralian Embassy, and then I was here starting at 5 in the morning." He took classes in the mid­dle of the day. "It was all too stressful," he says.

When Tameka was born, Field quit both school and his embassy job. He says that he raised Tameka him­self on his McDonald's salary. "I'd buy her books or pay when­ev­er she wanted to get pizza or what­ev­er," he told me. "My broth­er's a teach­er, and he worked closely with her on her schoolwork."

Tameka Gongs just graduated from the SEED School of Wash­ington. She was the class salu­tato­rian and is now a freshman at Louisiana State Uni­versity. Field told me this with pride. "I wish that school wasn't so far away," he said. "It's so far away. And what I am gonna do now that she ain't here? I just don't know."

* * *

That Friday at 2:30 p.m., the lunch rush was still on. There were 15 or so people gazing up at the menu board. The mango pineapple smooth­ie had been a hit all week long. "We sold 350 yes­ter­day," Reyes told me, "and they haven't even started the TV ads yet. Pretty soon, we'll be sell­ing 1,000 a day. We'll have to hire some­one just to make mango pineapple smooth­ies."

A boy of 12 or 13 ambled by our table, fresh from nearby Randall Pool, and still dripping and bare-chested. "My friend," Reyes said, "you gotta put your shirt on." His manner was genial, almost apologet­ic. It was as if Reyes re­membered be­ing a kid him­self, swimming on hot, humid days in the riv­er that snaked through his village back in Guatemala. I thought about how far he had come, wading across the bor­der, then living with 16 oth­er Guatemalans in a one-bed­room apart­ment, then danc­ing and holding the phone as he bragged to his mom about his new job at McDonald's.

"It's go­ing to get busy here this summer," he told me. "Summer is always our biggest sea­son, and they'll want to make more mon­ey this year, I'm sure. But that's okay. That's good. That's the American way. That's the American way. And I won't leave this place," Reyes said, ges­tur­ing at the restaurant around him. "When I walk in here, I can do what­ev­er I want. It's like home."

Eventually, Reyes's cell­phone rang and he excused him­self, the phone pressed to his ear with a bent shoul­der. He swept past the fryer vats, in­specting the grease. He looked over the coffee and the oatmeal and the soft drink mach­ines. He cupped his hand over the receiv­er and had a rapid-fire exchange with the woman working the drive-through window. He made sure ev­ery­thing was in or­der. It was hot out­side. The customers would keep com­ing all night long.

Bill Donahue is a writ­er living in Port­land, Ore. His last story for the Mag­a­zine chron­icled his debut as a cross-country ski rac­er. He can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.