By STEVEN ERLANGER

C H A N T E L O U P - L E S -V I G N E S , France - Fadela Amara, France’s secretary of state for urban policy, had listened to the problems of the day care center, talked to the workers, hugged some of the children, and then at the door, on the way to another meeting in this racially mixed suburb, she was stopped one more time for one more request.
“Listen,’ she finally said, “I’m not Zorro!
But at 44, this left-wing feminist with no higher education is something else: one of the highest-ranking Muslim women in France, with overall responsibility for bringing new hope to the poor, angry banlieues - the working-class suburbs of immigrants - that burst into flames three years ago, shocking the country.
Last month, Ms. Amara was at the center of a meeting of all government ministers on the problems of the banlieues. Each minister was responsible for detailing a program to help the five million to six million French citizens - some 8 percent of the population, most of them immigrants or their descendants - who live in the banlieues, where youth unemployment can reach 40 percent.
The idea is to promote more job creation and cultural options, better health care, transportation, law enforcement and education in what Ms. Amara calls the “lost territories of the republic. Ms. Amara, one of 10 children whose Algerian father is illiterate, is supposed to be, as she says, “the leader of the orchestra, armed only with a little baton and the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Mr. Sarkozy, who as interior minister three years ago called the rioters “rabble and “scum, has put three women from immigrant backgrounds into his government, including the state secretary for human rights in the Foreign Office, Rama Yade, 31, and the justice minister, Rachida Dati, 42.
Ms. Amara, a practicing Muslim who never went to college and never married, retains the strong accent of an Arab immigrant and sometimes uses slang.
While a Socialist, Ms. Amara said she was disgusted with the party’s taste for luxury and its endless leadership battles. But she would never have voted for Mr. Sarkozy, she said, and as a self-described “militant, she found her way into politics through a very different and much angrier route.
In 1978, when she was 14, in the housing project near Clermont-Ferrand where she was born, she saw her brother, Malik, 5, killed by a drunken driver. She saw the police side with the driver and, “most important, I saw the police use racist remarks toward my parents, particularly my mom, she said. “It was a very violent seizure of conscience, like an electrical shock, she has said. Ever since, she said, “I’m angry, and I don’t accept that in my country there are injustices.
Radicalized, she became a fierce campaigner against racism and for women’s rights - including within her own Arab Muslim community .
Ms. Amara came to Chanteloup-les- Vignes, she said, to look at promising initiatives that could be copied elsewhere.
She was particularly interested in Baby- Loup, a day care center that is, very unusually in France, open 24 hours, seven days a week. It serves the maids, police officers and casual workers who often toil at night and on weekends.
Ms. Amara is also concerned by the growing power of radical Islam among unemployed youth, on the margins, listening to preachers in what she called “the Islam of the basements.
She believes the radicals are an isolated minority. “But it is not normal that today in my country a part of the youth who live in these banlieues have as their future unemployment, prison or Islamism.